All through Fissures (lost and found), Actors Theater of Louisville's cunningly crafted collaborative riff on how the mind works, I kept thinking how much Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and T. S. Eliot paved the way for it. This quick-moving, one-hour piece, conceived by artists from the no-longer-operating Theatre de la Jeune Lune in Minneapolis and the same area's Workhaus Collective of nationally recognized playwrights, is the second of seven full-length and four 10-minute plays in the 34th annual Humana Festival of New American Plays.
On Michael B. Raiford's blindingly white set of wooden blocks plus some metal steps going down to an unseen cellar actors Casey Greig, Megan Hill, Emily Gunyou Halaas and Nathan Keepers -- costumed in white -- relate stories mixed with mind games that compel attention. Only those four are listed in the program. So it's surprising to have an older actor, also in white and wearing a bit of fabric with the words "I'm not there, I'm here," appear to offer an extended monologue and close the play by taking ownership and incorporating previous back-and-forth episodes as his own.
This turns out to be Dominique Serrand, Fissures director and co-writer (along with Steve Epp, Cory Hinkle, Dominic Orlando, Deborah Stein and Victoria Stewart) who was a co-founder and artistic director of Theatre de la Jeune Lune. Why the odd choice to be anonymous? What purpose does it serve? It merely confuses and annoys.
"Oh, the tricks your mind can play," Rodgers and Hart observed in their "Where or When" song. Tricks aplenty are described, analyzed, rejected, accepted, and dramatized as the uniformly excellent young cast tries to remember times and feelings they've experienced.
Sample speech by Emily: "I read this somewhere--or somebody told me -- I don't remember -- that every time you remember something, you only remember half of what you remembered the last time you remembered it. So every time you remember something, you're also forgetting it. It gets farther away. Faces become shapes become splotches, paragraphs become sentences become words become sounds. Hills become dots and then I don't know
"But another thing! If you remember something wrong, that still becomes part of the way you'll remember it next time. So you're remembering something that never really happened, but it becomes part of your memory anyway So if a man is walking down the street and thinks he sees his dead wife, and he follows her, then there's always a part of him that will remember his wife walking down the street, even if she never actually did."
Grasping to find words that are on the tips of their tongues, they seek to capture them through gestures. (Thankfully they don't resort to the sloppy all-too-common habit of injecting "you know" after every other phrase they utter.)
Struggling to communicate, they use magic markers to draw pictures of streets and buildings or write words that revive moments. In photos they don't recognize themselves or don't remember others in the frame. Boxes of books and mementos that pile up over the years become mysterious.
"Some things are just lost they disappear," says Megan. "But other things (such as books) return to you Or maybe you only thought they were lost, but really they were just somewhere else--without you, but not lost. For example, if I were to walk out this door, I would disappear--for you I would."
A taste of orange candy conjures up a memory of trains in Europe, just as a madeleine soaked in tea unleashed a flood of memories for Proust. These characters, as do all of us, start stories, stop and begin again with different details as thoughts engender other thoughts, echoing Woolf's evocations in "The Waves" and parroting Eliot's Prufrock who finds that "in a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse."
Perhaps, as Emily says toward play's end as she and the other three young actors recapitulate some of their lines, "None of it makes any sense."
