By Geary Danihy
As we make friends and perhaps
become intimate with some of them, they eventually want to know “who we are.”
That is, they want to hear our stories, what happened before they met us that
made us who we are right now…and we tell them. We attempt to recreate those
moments from our past we believe were defining, that molded us, perhaps, at
times, twisted us, into the walking, talking breathing portraits that we
present to them…but, do we ever get it right? Are the stories we tell the truth
or mere simulacrums? As they listen to the verbal portraits we paint, do they sense
the pentimenti that we perhaps cannot?
Pentimento, from “pentire” – to
repent – from the Latin -- “penitere” – kissing cousin of “penance” and “penitence.”
All of the words are appropriate when thinking about “Forever,” which is
enjoying its world premiere at Long Wharf Theatre. This journey back in time, a
one-woman show written and performed by the talented Dael Orlandersmith, is an
exercise in how we deal with the past, how we run away from it only to find
that we cannot escape, that it is within us, a part of us, yet that it is also
protean, for the past we thought was true when we first broke free from the
familial ties or, in some cases, chains we believed bound us is palpably
different from the past we understand and eventually embrace as we mature.
On a platform stage bare save for
two chairs and a kitchen table upon which rests a candle, a record player, some
LPs and a small stack of books, Orlandersmith tells her story, which initially
has the feel of a classic screed -- an adult looking back and complaining about
how she was so misunderstood and mistreated as a child – but Orlandersmith is
better and smarter than that, and she has more to say about the often skewed
relationship between parents and children: the clash of needs, desires, dreams
and fears.
There is occasional laughter from
the audience, but for the most part those in attendance create a rapt silence
that is tangible as Orlandersmith weaves a tapestry of a mother-daughter
conflict that can only begin to be understood in retrospect. Orlandersmith
draws the audience in as intimates as she remembers her mother, initially
presented as a cigarette-smoking, Scotch-drinking harridan, and also remembers
the authors, artists, and singers who spoke to her as she was growing up – the
dark and the light of her childhood, initially offered as thesis and
antithesis, but eventually there is synthesis, a mature understanding of who
her mother was and how much that is vital and essential in her is her
inheritance.
Once Orlandersmith has captured her
audience, she uses the classic dramatic form of rising action, climax and
denouement that leads to a catharsis of sorts. Central to the play’s movement
is an extended description of a rape that occurred when Orlandersmith was a
young girl and her mother’s slow descent into death, culminating in
Orlandersmith viewing her mother’s body in a hospital morgue – both scenes
emotionally riveting on multiple levels. And then we are brought back to where
we began, the Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, where so many luminaries are
buried, and where Orlandersmith, standing at Jim Morrison’s grave, begins to
understand that the past and the present commingle, and that who she is – her
dreams, her delights, her passions – are part of her inheritance from a young
girl with a 19-inch waist, a dancer who quoted poetry and sat on a porch in a
humid South Carolina night and…dreamed.
Riveting and emotionally
satisfying, often poetic, “Forever” asks us to consider what we think we know
about the past and acknowledge that it takes time to “get it right,” if we ever
can, for the more we learn about the past the more we sense we do not and can
never know.
“Forever” runs through Feb. 1. For
tickets or more information call 203-787-4282 or go to www.longwharf.org.
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