MEMORY AS AN ACT OF LOVE
The East Coast premiere of playwright Steven Drukman’s snappy and cleverly written Pru Payne is movingly brought to the stage under SpeakEasy Stage founder Paul Daigneault’s direction. A top-notch cast gives voice to Drukman’s script, led by the especially impressive Karen MacDonald in the demanding role of Pru, a public intellectual with a razor-sharp wit who is transformed by love and dementia into a very different person from the erstwhile critic who wrote biting reviews. Words like memory, remember, member, and dismember are repeated and examined — interrogated as we say today — until they no longer have meaning.
Karen MacDonald
The play opens on a sparely elegant set by Christopher Swader and Justin Swader, a circular gray dais with a nondescript table and the sort of armless chairs found in institutional settings. A few minutes into the action, shifts in Aja M. Jackson‘s lighting and designer Nathan Leigh‘s sound of applause transform the setting from a memory care clinic to an awards ceremony, and suddenly Pru, whom we have just seen being checked into a memory care clinic by her son Thomas (De’Lon Grant), is addressing an audience of New York City luminaries as she receives an award from the American Academy of Arts and Aesthetics. We learn that she is, in fact, the first woman to have received this award—and as she points out, that’s ridiculous, because it is 1988.
De’Lon Grant and Marianna Bassham
The character of Pru, Drukman says, was inspired by those great 20th-century intellectuals Susan Sontag, Diana Trilling, and Mary McCarthy. The idea for a play about loss of memory came to him after Trump’s 2016 election; he wondered how Americans could have forgotten their own culture. “Then suddenly there was a fruitful collision between this idea of cultural amnesia and this play I always wanted to write about a female public intellectual.”
Karen MacDonald and Gordon Clapp
Pru’s acceptance speech reflects the verbal sparring of those great ladies. It is witty and mocking and filled with alliteration — she lauds and derides the audience, whom she refers to as “this acclaimed, august assemblage of alcoholics” and comments that while “this prize portends Pru Payne’s permanent place in the pantheon, there’s a price paid for this prestige.” There is a condition to Pru’s award: she is required to produce a memoir, something that will assemble her life’s work of critical essays into a single body of work, an act of membering and remembrance.
Karen MacDonald and Gordon Clapp
Pru drops names — composer Milton Babbitt, painter Jasper Johns — and mocks Norman Mailer, the writer whose private and political actions were as controversial as his writing. She refers to “the B-movie actor” who has been in the Oval Office for the past eight years. The smart word-play and MacDonald’s vigorous performance are delightful. I laughed a lot, and only my concern about disturbing those around me or missing some of the lines kept me from turning to my companion to say, “Isn’t this wonderful!”
Gordon Clapp and De’Lon Gran
It is wonderful, but as Pru’s speech continues, it becomes increasingly vulgar, no longer suitable for the “august assemblage” and she loses her train of thought. Suddenly the lights shift, we hear the soundtrack of a TV game show, and once again we are in the memory care clinic where Marianna Bassham is Dr. Dolan, who explicates Pru’s the medical condition. Confused by the TV screen, Pru briefly thinks they are at the airport. Once her son explains where they are, she complains about the growing ubiquity of screens, a sardonic foreshadowing of our present day.
Marianna Bassham and Karen MacDonald
One of the pleasures of Pru Payne is that while it is a play about memory — the loss of memory, the effort to remember through the writing of a memoir — it also offers viewers a chance to remember, whether or not they are old enough to have lived through the late 1980s, with its references to prominent artists and writers of the time, to the political situation, and to the TV shows of the era, which we experience only through their sound tracks — the screen Pru sees isn’t visible to us.
Karen MacDonald and Marianna Bassham
Drukman and MacDonald convey Pru’s transformation in numerous ways. When she first arrives at the clinic, she still sees herself as the guardian of High Art and tries to turn off the TV in the waiting area. Later, she laughs with delight at an episode of Hogan’s Heroes, the sitcom set in a World War II POW camp. (Oh, those silly Nazis! So easy for clever American prisoners to fool.)
Karen MacDonald and Gordon Clapp
But that’s not all. Pru is a proudly independent woman who has never married nor committed to a long-term relationship (her son Thomas, who is Black, was the result of sperm donor chosen for his musical talent). Yet she falls in love with Gus Cudahy (Gordon Clapp), another patient at the clinic who is also the custodian and bus driver at the prep school Thomas attended. “Outside this place, you’d never look at me twice,” he says after an inadvertent insult from Pru. But the two of them have become lovers by then, they are in “this place,” and Pru no longer cares about the kinds of accomplishments and tastes that once mattered so much to her. Gus brings her laughter and romance and intimacy and she does the same for him.
Greg Maraio and De’Lon Grant
Memory plays a very different role in a second love story: Pru’s son Thomas and Gus’s son Art (Greg Maraio), the role Maraio originated in Arizona Theatre Company’s world premiere of Pru Payne, have some history from their days at the prep school. Their first encounter at the clinic as they drop off their parents is awkward; both pretend to hardly remember each other. Thomas’s attraction to Art is evident, but it’s not immediately clear whether the feeling is mutual. In contrast to their parents, whose love affair is adversely affected by the loss of memory, Thomas and Art will recover memories each had pushed aside and that will allow them, like their parents, to overcome the barriers of social and economic class.
Greg Maraio and De’Lon Grant
Gus, on the other hand, has to make a difficult decision that has nothing to do with Pru’s greater wealth and sophistication. As Pru is transformed by dementia, he must decide how memories — or the lack of them — affect a person’s identity, and what it means to love someone whose memories have disappeared.
Karen MacDonald and Gordon Clapp
photos courtesy of Nile Scott Studios
Pru Payne
SpeakEasy Stage Company
Roberts Studio Theatre, Stanford Calderwood Pavilion
Boston Center for the Arts, 527 Tremont Street in Boston
Wed & Thurs at 7; Fri at 7:30; Sat at 2 & 7:30; Sun at 3; Thurs at 2 (Nov. 14)
ends on November 16, 2024
for tickets ($25-$85), call 617.933.8600 or visit SpeakEasyStage