MEMORY LOOPS AND ECHOES IN
GARDNER’S THE STAIRCASE
Rain doesn’t fall in The Staircase. It lingers, heavy and waiting. Like a secret no one asked to hear. Like a mother halfway between a lullaby and a memory she can’t put down.
In the hands of Noa Gardner, this first-time playwright turns weather into something far denser than atmosphere. The rain becomes weight. It becomes memory, generational and unresolved. Nothing in this play simply happens. Everything returns. Gardner doesn’t write scenes so much as carve out a space: close, rhythmic, disorientingly familiar. Time is slippery here, repeating itself with just enough difference to make you question whether it’s memory or haunting. Under Gaye Taylor Upchurch’s careful and quietly muscular direction at South Coast Rep, the show doesn’t unfold. It tightens. Each repeated line, each echo, each silence left hanging too long isn’t just mood. It’s a trapdoor. You find yourself falling through it.
Wil Kahele and Ehulani Hope Kāne
At the center are MOTHER and SON. Not just characters, but anchors. They feel ancient but raw, mythic but stubbornly alive. Gardner never lets them drift into the symbolic. He lets them ache and ramble and contradict themselves, just like the rest of us.
Ehulani Hope Kāne’s MOTHER never comes apart quietly. She pushes through a fog only she can name, wielding memory like a tool and a shield. She’s funny, sharp, dangerous. There’s no caricature in her unraveling. She’s not fading. She’s insisting. Even when the lights shift and the edges blur, MOTHER is the one dragging the story forward, whether it happened or not.
Wil Kahele
Wil Kahele’s SON walks like a man holding something in his teeth. His stillness carries no ease. It’s the product of years spent choking back what should have been spoken. His stammer isn’t a quirk. It’s history, imprinted in his throat. When he finally tears into the staircase, ripping out boards like he’s trying to reach a buried organ, it lands with the force of excavation.
The play doesn’t have a tidy plot, but the shape of it might be this: in a home where the stairs never stop creaking and the rain won’t stop pressing against the windows, SON drifts between caretaking and suffocation. MOTHER moves through her days with old stories and card games, slipping further from the now, tightening her grip on the then. They circle each other. Repeat themselves. Forget, remember, forget again. Into this loop returns SWEETHEART, SON’s past turned maybe-future. Her presence shifts the rhythm. Not enough to save it, but enough to shake it. And just when the repetitions begin to stretch thin, when it feels like the house might exhale for the first time, the footsteps from upstairs reach the landing. FATHER appears. Not as memory. As body.
Ehulani Hope Kāne and Nara Cardenas
Ben Cain doesn’t walk into the role so much as crash through it. FATHER arrives with weight, voice, and history. This is no ghost. Cain doesn’t reach for menace or apology. He plays a man built out of contradiction, equal parts warmth and control, tenderness and deflection. The confrontation between FATHER and SON is not a climax. It’s a rupture. You don’t watch it unfold. You endure it.
SWEETHEART, played with understated force by Nara Cardenas, doesn’t offer escape. She’s not a solution. She’s another thread in the tangle. Her arrival opens a window, but doesn’t promise air. Her scenes with SON ache with a sense of time missed, of something maybe salvageable, maybe already gone.
Nara Cardenas
Language in The Staircase is not a tool for clarity. It’s the texture of the world itself. Characters slip between English, Hawaiian, and Creole without warning or translation. Each language holds its own authority, its own intimacy, its own power. When SON turns to pidgin in moments of stress or confrontation, it isn’t for effect. It’s survival. It’s inheritance. The play refuses to flatten language for ease. Instead, it asks the audience to feel its rhythms, even when they don’t understand every word.
Beneath it all, the steady throb of the Ipu drum. Played live by Kainui Blaze Whiting from above the stage, it becomes more than music. It becomes pulse. Time in The Staircase doesn’t move forward. It circles, dragged forward only by rhythm.
Kainui Blaze Whiting
The design choices here don’t illustrate. They inhabit. Rachel Hauck’s set captures memory not as place but pressure. The staircase doesn’t rise toward heaven. It rises toward uncertainty. The house feels lived in, then haunted, then lived in again. Sara Ryung’s costumes whisper before they speak. Practical, worn, but edged with memory and resistance. And Josh Epstein’s lighting doesn’t point. It hovers. It delays. Sometimes it refuses.
Gardner isn’t interested in catharsis. He’s after something stickier. This isn’t a play that arrives at clarity. It doesn’t even pretend that’s an option. What if myth comforts but truth injures? What if love survives damage, but doesn’t undo it? What if coming home is its own kind of exile?
Ehulani Hope Kāne and Wil Kahele
The Staircase isn’t neat. It breathes. It mutters to itself. It won’t let you leave unchanged.
I’m not Native Hawaiian. But I’ve watched my mother not know what day it was, then suddenly remember something from decades ago with frightening clarity. I’ve lived inside stories where two versions of the same moment argued for space. Gardner gets that. Viscerally.
You don’t see The Staircase for answers. You go to sit inside the weight of what memory refuses to release.
Ehulani Hope Kāne
The Staircase is not geared towards the casual theatergoer. This is work for the ones who lean in, who don’t mind sitting in the dark a little longer than is comfortable. It asks you to track echoes, to hold silence without flinching, to follow threads that may never tie off cleanly. It speaks to those willing to wrestle with the long shadows of family, the ache of paths not taken, and the quiet terror of what waits on the other side of memory. You don’t attend this play. You weather it.
When Gardner writes again, I will be there. Even if the lights flicker. Even if the path ahead isn’t clear.
Ehulani Hope Kāne and Wil Kahele
photos by Robert Huskey
Nara Cardenas and Wil Kahele
The Staircase
South Coast Rep
part of the Pacific Playwrights Festival
100 minutes, no intermission
Julianne Argyros Stage, 655 Town Center Drive in Costa Mesa
ends on May 18, 2025
for tickets ($35-$114), call 714.708.5555 or visit SCR
for more shows, visit Theatre in LA
