Review: The Half-Life of Memory (Cold Basement Dramatics)

  
  
The Half-Life of Memory

Written by Jason Lindner
Directed by Sophie Blumberg
DCASE Storefront Theatre, 66 E. Randolph (map)
thru June 29  |  tickets: $15   |  more info
  
Check for half-price tickets 
  
  
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Stream-of-consciousness lecture play too manic to care

Cold Basement Dramatics presents

The Half-Life of Memory

Review by Lawrence Bommer

There’s some putative method in the madness of Cold Basement Dramatics’ Chicago premiere. This scrambled memory play by Chicagoland native Jason Lindner is based on an author’s relative who was a Manhattan Project physicist and Glencoe resident. (He moved there because he believed that the North Shore suburb would escape major radiation from a nuclear hit on Chicago.) In a wildly fanciful, stream-of-consciousness lecture, Lindner crazily imagines him as former particle physicist Salek. Years later, the scientist is now dependent on drugs and verging on suicide. Salek recalls—well, what doesn’t he? Just about everything that happened to him up to the first controlled chain reaction and nuclear blast at Trinity on July 16, 1945, as well as the tragic deaths of his sister, wife and daughter. And much, much more.

At play’s end a now imploding Salek disingenuously cries out, “There is nothing to remember.” Alas, it just ain’t so: This torturous drama does nothing but summon up “the half-life of memory” as Salek ponders how the past gathers ferocity enough to infect the present. In a sort of demented illustrated lecture, complete with chalk boards and rolling props, Salek summons up his famous associates and their endless mutual recriminations—Albert Einstein, a kind of father figure, curiously religious despite his yen for quantum physics; the plagiarizing, gung-ho, bomb-loving master manipulator Edward Teller; Robert Oppenheimer (wrongly depicted as a pragmatic pawn in the project rather than the first great resister to nuclear war); and Enrico Fermi as an Italian stereotype who likes to play “Go Fish.” They’re depicted as spiteful and egomaniacal as they seek to corrupt Salek’s memories in order to spare their reputations. No doubt, they’re exactly as the author’s relation remembered them in his addlepated final days–but the corrosive effect of this rogues’ gallery is to trivialize the making of the A Bomb into a Marx Brothers movie in the making.

The approach of death is supposed to concentrate the mind, but for Salek (played with amphetamine zeal by Mark Maxwell) it only triggers a pile-driving phantasmagoria of incoherent recollections. It’s hard to care here: So little is at stake and we’re never ahead of the manic action.

Illustrated by slides of mushroom clouds and shredded bodies, and mutating like a fever dream, Salek’s mind is propelled by equal torrents of denial and guilt. Like a plutonium leak, it spills over into desperately dramatized, metaphor-mad illusions—a dreadful vaudeville scene, snapshots from his Polish origins and dementia-laden flashbacks from his marriage. Then there’s the haunting, goading image of the Eyeball Person, a Hiroshima burn victim who also plays a part in this demonstration of what Salek calls “radioactive consciousness.” (Her croaking out the popular song “Nagasaki” is typical of this script’s pointless overkill.)

Buttressed by persuasive performances, director Sophie Blumberg moves Lindner’s too-long, free-associating circus fairly fast. She needs to–in order to disguise the T.M.I. that ultimately weighs down Lindner’s (atomic) blast from the past. (The hodgepodge potpourri of assorted European accents doesn’t help.) Unfortunately, by the welcome end of this tedious mess the real question of accountability–for inventing nuclear weapons in order to drop them onto two Japanese cities–gets lost in a mishmash of mutating memories.

If this play were a physics equation, it would yield too much unprocessed energy. The Half-Life of Memory suffers from a distracting if not disturbing penchant for projecting human emotions onto scientific formulae. An ethical cop-out, it falls far short of a moral-minded debate about a once and future danger.

Rating: ★★

The Half-Life of Memory continues through June 29th at DCASE Storefront Theatre, 66 E. Randolph (map), with performances Thursdays-Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays 2pm.  Tickets are $10-$15, and are available by phone (800-595-4849) or online through Tix.com (check for half-price tickets at Goldstar.com). More information at ColdBasement.org.  (Running time: 2 hours, includes an intermission)

Photos by Liz Siedt

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artists

cast

Mark Maxwell (Salek), Teagan Walsh-Davis (Helle), Stephen Dale (Robert Oppenheimer), Daniel Sappington (Edward Teller), Dan Planz (Enrico Fermi), Michael Sater (Albert Einstein), Shozzett Silva (Eyeball Person), Laura Barati (Nurse, Tauba)

behind the scenes

Sophie Blumberg (director), Sarah Jo White (costume design), Matt Reich (sound design), Jeff Shields (prop design), John Kelly (lighting design), Dustin Pettigrew (set design), Sam Hubbard (violence design), Sammi Grant (dialect coach), Janelle Boudreau (stage manager), Sam Barickman (technical director), Danielle Whaley (production manager), Alex Kump (asst. production manager), Jeremy Ehlinger (casting director), Liz Siedt (photos)

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