By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Julia is in prison. Well, she feels that way. She is in a memory care facility. Yet she is imprisoned mentally. Her memories are getting blurrier and blurrier, she complains. And then they disappear. She can’t even remember her husband’s name nor the details of what had been an active life.
To top off her confusion, this man, Frank, keeps coming into her room and bothering her. He also brings chocolate from the dining room because Julia doesn’t venture out.
And a piece of the puzzle she’s working on has gone missing.
Julia’s dilemma unfolds in the one-act play “Not Quite Gone” on stage this weekend and next at the Black Swamp Players’ Oak Street Theatre.
Directed by Melissa Shaffer, the play by Ethan Woody Brown was the winner of the Players’ annual writing competition. An earlier version was staged in 2020 as part of the Bowling Green Drama Club’s one acts production of student written and directed plays. At the time, Shaffer reports: “Ethan Woody Brown was an 18-year-old senior at BG High School. He conducted interviews with staff and residents at the Perrysburg Commons elderly care facility.”
He is now a student at Ohio University where he studies international issues of poverty and culture.
“Not Quite Gone” opens tonight (June 16) at 8 with the playwright attending. The Black Swamp Players’ production continues Saturday at 8 and Sunday at 2 p.m., and next weekend, June 23 and 24 at 8 p.m., and June 25 at 2 p.m. Click for tickets.
Now, the audience can be forgiven for thinking that maybe Frank (Bill Pierson) is perhaps the forgotten husband. This, though, is quickly cleared up as he helps Julia (Carol Ann Erford) remember her husband’s name was Ryan. He helps her organize the board on which she keeps details. She has sudden flashes of specific memory – how she met Ryan (Tim McMahon) in kindergarten, her departure to study in France, details of their married lives and of parenthood. Her younger self, called Julie, is portrayed by Elizabeth Coronado.
Now she has only one relative, a granddaughter Zoey (Rebekah Bieniek), the daughter of Julia’s daughter Ellie, also portrayed by Bieniek. Zoey questions why she should lead the active life her grandmother urges her have when she carries “the dementia gene.”
“What’s the point of making memories just to forget them?” she wonders.
Frank helps perk her up as a faux grandpa. He is all alone in the world, and though his memory is intact, he feels he has little to remember. “The measure of a good life is not how much you remember,” he says, “but how much you want to remember.”
The nurse Emily (Karen Noble) is a sympathetic presence, who calls Frank on some of hijinks, but appreciates his good heart.
Everyone here has a good heart, and the audience will appreciate spending a memorable hour with them.
