The Safe House

The Safe House – City Lit Theater

The Safe House, premiering this month at City Lit Theater, focuses on Bridget, a young actress in 1982 returning to her family’s home in Lansing, Michigan, and her grandmother, Hannah. The end of a marriage and a lull in her acting career have made the trip home attractive, but not all is well. Hannah has begun to forget things. It started with double-booking on Mother’s Day. It has progressed to not remembering whether she has taken today’s insulin shot. Hannah’s children, who still live nearby, have begun trying to convince her to move to a retirement home, or ‘retirement complex’ as they call it.

The highlight of the play is undoubtedly marssie Mencotti as Hannah. With luck, everyone has a grandparent or some other relative like this: funny, strong, warm… the person in the family capable of anything. She is obviously a role model for Bridget, and the thought that she could be slipping away is understandably terrifying. What helps the audience understand this is Mencotti’s ability to make her reminiscences come to life. The stories of emigrating from Germany and working to purchase a bar and build a home come alive in her performance.  These vividly shared memories both draw the audience into the story, and underscore that aging can be a cruel joke. Hannah’s wishes to live and die in the house she shared with her husband and in which she raised her children, and have her ashes buried in the garden next to his feels eminently reasonable. The idea that she can’t is heartbreaking.

Kat Evans as Bridget and Paul Chakrin as Mathius, Hannah’s son and Bridget’s uncle, round out the small cast. Given the short run time, both Bridget and Mathius get reduced slightly to their conflicting positions on what do about Hannah, but, by the end, both manage to convey some complexity in their positions and reactions. Mathius is genuinely concerned about his mother, but you can wonder whether moving to a ‘retirement complex’ is really to make things easier for her or for him. Even Bridget’s championing of Hannah’s independence may be because it’s too hard to picture this woman who kept her safe as a child needing that kind of protection now.

With a run time of 80 minutes including an intermission, the play does suffer a bit from its brevity. There is a subplot involving domestic violence that feels a little forced and too quickly treated. That is all the more shocking given how delicately and accurately it treats the issues of aging and memory loss.

This is a good a place as any to mention that my day job is working as an attorney with survivors of domestic violence, so I may be a little more sensitive than most, but the vocabulary the characters used didn’t have the same authenticity that was so effortlessly present with the portrayal of the onset of Alzheimer’s. Moreover, it seemed to come out of nowhere and really didn’t get the level of exploration that Alzheimer’s did, so it just stuck out for me. I actually saw the show with a friend and colleague whose own mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s and, in addition to giving me permission to share that here, she told me that the show mirrored her own family’s experience very well, particularly in noting the difference in how a child versus a grandchild of someone suffering Alzheimer’s is likely to respond and how proximity or distance can affect whether others recognize the onset of the disease. She thought the portrayal in the show was spot on.

In the end, The Safe House left me a little in love with and very much heartbroken for Hannah. When she recalls, with perfect clarity, a New Year’s Eve in 1949, she sparkles. She is every inch the woman who raised a family and built a life in a new country, and she has every right to demand that she should live in any house she damned well pleases. But then you watch her nearly give herself a second, and potentially fatal, dose of insulin because she forgot she already injected herself today, and the world seems incredibly unfair. With the short run time, the show really doesn’t resolve anything, but in a way, there isn’t a resolution to be had. That’s almost a way a to describe Alzheimer’s. It takes all our endings from us — the ones we have and the ones we think we’ll get — so what ultimately amounts to a brief character sketch still manages to be very affecting.

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Kevin Curran

Presented November 2-December 16 by City Lit Theater Company, 1020 W Bryn Mawr, Chicago.

Tickets are available in person at the box office, by calling 773-293-3682 or by visiting www.citylit.org.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found at www.theatreinchicago.com.