Theater review
“Milvotchkee, Visconsin”
Grade: D
8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. 5 p.m. Sundays. Also: 8 p.m. Oct. 7. Through Oct. 20. $20-$25. Synchronicity Theatre, 14th Street Playhouse, 173 14th St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-484-8636.
Bottom line: Like the main character, the play is hopelessly lost.
In “Milvotchkee, Visconsin,” Chicago-based playwright Laura Jacqmin’s take on the tricky subject of dementia, it seems as if the play itself is losing its mind.
A world premiere production by Synchronicity Theatre, “Milvotchkee” describes the journey of Molly, a tour guide at Wisconsin Concrete Park, a folk art environment built by Fred Smith, a man who may be the Midwest’s answer to Georgia’s Howard Finster and Eddie Owens Martin.
In her so-called “comedy about a tragedy,” Jacqmin uses symbol, metaphor and a kind of hallucinogenic, Borgesian structure to describes Molly’s descent into madness. (Molly has “a hole in her head,” and gets struck by lighting. Neither device is literal, though they are presented as such.)
Carrying around her annotated book of notes about the park, Molly (Ellen McQueen) tries over and over again to guide visitors around the park that seems to have been etched over time in her DNA, even if as it vanishes from her memory. Along the way, she encounters the ghost of her dead husband (James Donadio), her exasperated adult children (Kelly Criss and Steve Hudson) and a pageant of doctors, park visitors, snake-oil salesman and other characters that spring from the figments of her disintegrating mind. (Even the hole in her head appears in human form.)
On the one hand, Molly’s journey is a sad and painful affair — especially the scenes in which she collapses in a pile of sticky notes attached to alarm clocks (her poignant attempt to organize her life) and gets packed off to an institution by her children (a moment that will resonate with anyone who has ever had a loved one in a nursing home, assisted living center, etc). On the other hand, this show is just painful to watch.
While you admire the author’s attempt to take on this important topic, the play — as envisioned here by director Patricia Henrtize — is a mess. The characters resemble cartoons (a conceit that cheapens the tale), and they speak in a self-conscious, quotation-mark style that is likely meant to be ironic but that comes off as flat and self-mocking. And though there are some nice moments by supporting players Holly Stevenson and Charles Green (in a variety of roles), the performances generally lack nuance. McQueen, in particular, feels rather one note and out of her depth.
In eschewing conventional realism for this herky-jerky experimental work, Jacqmin diminishes the material. (I found Sandra Deer’s “The Subject Tonight Is Love,” a semi-autobiographical play based on her mother’s illness with Alzheimer’s, to be a much richer and fuller experience.) Set designer Phillip Male’s low-budget approximation of the concrete park (unlike so much of his work, including “Venus in Fur,” running through Oct. 6 at Actor’s Express) feels thin and uninspired, too. Jonida Beqo’s costumes are appropriately pedestrian.
In the end, this 1 hour, 45 minute production feels strangely disjointed and almost interminable. It’s a lightning bolt that never happens. There are noble, well-intended failures, and then there are just plain flops. It pains me to say that “Mivotchkee, Visconsin” is the latter.
