A WHISPER THAT ECHOES
There are plays that knock you over with intensity. And there are those that seep in, settle under your skin, and stay there long after the lights come up. Adam Szymkowicz‘s Such Small Hands falls firmly in the latter category. This quiet but devastating meditation on memory, mortality, and devotion opened at the Chance Theater tonight, and if there’s justice in the universe of the theater gods, it will not fade into the darkness without leaving an indelible mark.
In documenting the slow-motion dissolution of a marriage beneath the crushing weight of dementia, Szymkowicz has accomplished something rarer than simple tragedy—he has fashioned a looking glass that holds up to us our own relentless future with unforgiving candor. The tale, which unfolds in a modest New England house, concerns Paul (Bruce Goodrich) and Marie (Juliet Fischer), a pair who see the underpinning of their collective existence slip away one recollection at a time.
But this is no disease-of-the-week melodrama. Szymkowicz has the sense to understand that real heartbreak is not to be found in the big moments but in the daily – in the morning coffee ritual turned minefield of rote inquiry, in the gradual erosion of Marie’s answers to “Do I take sugar?” like steps whose corners have been smoothed by decades of use.
The script is deceptively understated. The dialogue is immediate and natural, but every conversation is infused with an undercurrent of grief. Memory comes and goes like a faulty light. One minute, Paul remembers the specifics of his son’s boyhood. The next, he forgets that James does not live in the house anymore. Marie, exhausted and patient, walks a tightrope between humoring his delusions and coaxing him back to reality gently. When Paul, in one of his ever-more-infrequent moments of lucidity, starts his mantra-like request for a fatal dose of sleeping pills, it comes not as melodrama but as the despairing gasp of a drowning man who can still feel the water closing in around him.
If I have any quibble about the production, it lies in the casting. Goodrich and Fischer (who appear at least a decade younger than the characters they portray) are good actors who grasp understatement, but they are acting age instead of becoming it. The play requires the actors to have time in their bones, and though makeup and a wig can add years to the face, it will not add decades of life to the way a person inhabits space. Still, their chemistry and naturalistic acting sustain the performance.
Director Matthew McCray has a keen sense of theatre space, and scenes bleed and blend together like watercolors in the rain. He smartly eschews sentimentality and allows the text’s understated heartbreak to grow organically. Set design by Ganymede Productions and projection design by McCray are ideally matched matched to the play, conjuring a world that appears to be in that in-between space between memory and reality.
There was a moment toward the end of the play when I began to cry. Not the showy sobs that occasionally interrupt more manipulative dramas, but the soft, involuntary tears of recognition.
This is what is so great about Such Small Hands—it understands that true tragedy isn’t operatic. It does not come with fanfares. It comes in the morning with coffee and pills, in the gentle corrections and patient repetitions, in the gradual accumulation of losses too small to have a name but too big to be borne.
When the lights went up on the performance I saw, I had to sit motionless for a moment, fearing that moving would shatter the spell the play had cast. In an era of theatrical bombast, when too many playwrights confuse loudness with power, Szymkowicz has done something achingly rare: a play that whispers its way into your heart and then makes itself at home there.
In brief, do not miss this one. It will haunt you, in all the best possible ways.
photos by Doug Catiller
Such Small Hands
Chance Theater
Cripe Stage, 5522 E. La Palma Ave. in Anaheim
80 minutes, no intermission
ends on March 30, 2025
for tickets, call 888.455.4212 or visit Chance
for more shows, visit Theatre in LA
