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The Other Place
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
The Road on Magnolia Theater
Through April 11.
Like many plays that deal with our mortality, those about dementia can be extraordinarily affecting. They speak to a loss of self nearly as complete and devastating as our physical demise.
A dispossession of this sort begins to overtake Juliana (Taylor Gilbert), the central character in Sharr White’s 80 minute one-act, The Other Place, here directed by Andre Barron with only limited success.
A neurologist who has abandoned her personal practice, Juliana now works for a pharmaceutical company, giving “seminars” and pitching new drugs to other doctors.
Though outwardly brisk and confident, internally Juliana is in crisis. She’s in the process of divorcing her unfaithful husband, Ian (Sam Anderson), while struggling to reconcile with her estranged daughter Laurel (Danielle Stephens), whom she hasn’t seen since the girl eloped with an older man some years back.
That’s the official story anyway. But as the play unfolds, we learn that the assumptions and circumstances Juliana has been operating under — and that she’s passed along to us — are largely fictional. Her husband isn’t carrying on an affair, neither are the two of them about to divorce. And the phone conversations with the daughter she’s been having turn out to be something else entirely.
The events she’s recalling are all part of a cognitive disintegration that’s been manifesting itself in memory problems and a failure to separate fact from fiction. One day things come to a head when, in the midst of a presentation, she loses her place, distracted by a vision of a girl in a yellow bikini sitting in the audience.
Every play or film about dementia — and there are increasingly more of them — asks: What remains of us when the essence of our selves is stripped away? Taylor Gilbert searches for the answer to that loaded question merely by choosing to play this part, but she hasn’t found it yet in a performance whose cerebral construct remains too visible. Nor is the pathos of her splintering marriage fully expressed. Anderson seems inaptly cast in his role and uncomfortable with it. To that extent the production is diminished.
Designer Kaitlyn Pietras’ projections (first of chromosomes, imaginatively conceived, and then of the sea) add dimension to the story. The most moving sequence transpires near the end, after Juliana has wandered into another woman’s home that had once been her own family’s residence, sold off years before following a traumatic event. The new resident — crisply portrayed by Stephens as a yuppie with a snotty sense of entitlement — coldly insists that Juliana leave. Then, at last understanding the extremity of Juliana’s condition, her indignation crumbles and is replaced by simple human solace.
The Road on Magnolia, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., N. Hlywd.; Fri.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 2 p.m.; through April 11. (818) 761-8838, RoadTeatre.org.
