As anyone who has lost a loved one can attest, memories are both friend and foe. We want to remember and fear forgetting. After all, if we can’t find them in memory, then they are truly lost to us. But remembering also requires reliving the good and bad parts of the past, and that, too, can be unbearably painful.
Carla Stillwell’s “The Divine Order of Becoming,” which she also directs for MPAACT, takes on that conundrum by journeying through the mind of Erica (Marina Dee), who is mourning the death of her mother, Eve (Daryl Charisse), from uterine cancer.
It’s an unabashedly sentimental piece, leavened with doses of wry wit and some fascinating insights into how parents have different relationships with their various children. In Erica’s case, she is the baby of the family and the one that Eve feels she got to fully mother, after surviving the alcohol-fueled abuse of her husband during the childhoods of her older daughters.
Through a series of domestic interludes — snapping green beans, fixing hair, rehearsing a poem to be performed at a school assembly — we see the sometimes-fraught but always-close bond between Erica and Eve. And we see the guilt and rage Erica feels as her mother’s diagnosis shows her that, no matter how “grown” she feels, she is still a child facing the loss of the most important person in her life. (Erica’s repeated insistence that she is a grown woman is parried by Eve’s tart observation, “Grown people don’t have to keep saying it.”)
There’s not a lot of subtext here, to be sure. “The Divine Order of Becoming” sometimes feels uncomfortably raw, like sitting with a friend who can’t stop telling us how awful they feel. There is an occasional awkwardness between Dee and Charisse that feels more like actors still trying to work out the beats in their performances than characters unsure of how far to tread with each other.
But I suspect that the direct and raw quality of this show is very much by design on Stillwell’s part. She fully understands that if you’re going to grapple with grief, you have to name it and remember it — good and bad — before you can move away from the twilight world of loss.
REVIEW: The Divine Order of Becoming by MPAACT
3 STARS
Through June 7, Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.; $21-$25 at 773-404-7336 or mpaact.org
Reid is a freelance critic.
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