Stephanie's New Play- Memory of Water

[judithmoose]

Got an email from Stephanie this morning letting me know that auditions are wrapping up today in Los Angeles for the play “The Memory of Water” by Shelagh Stephenson. Rehearsals begin on January 16th and will run from February 16th through March 11th at the Ensemble Theater in Santa Barbara. In 'The Memory of Water', playwright Shelagh Stephenson reunites three adult sisters at the family home to attend their mother's funeral. This emotionally-trying setting elicits both comical and deeply moving interactions between the sisters as they try to come to terms with each other and their loss. The show's title stems from the concept that all our memories are only as solid as water, and every person's idea of absolute truth ripples each time a story is retold or an event remembered. Stephenson's sharp look at these transformations within a slightly dysfunctional family results in a truly brilliant comedy by one of Britain's most celebrated contemporary playwrights. The play won the Olivier Award in 2000. Will let you know ticket prices as soon as they become available. If you are planning to attend please email me so I can give Steph a heads-up for visits like we did with “Tea At Five”.

Thanks and have a fabulous weekend!
Judy

[xenos1981]

My, my, my, Judith! Aren't you just EVERYWHERE?!?!

Xenos

[Myrtle Groggins]

Thanks for the info, Judith.

Let's see, if this plays runs through March 11th, does this mean SZ will be free for the Tennessee Williams Fest this year? Selfish of me, I know, but I do want her to come back again, the sooner the better. I suppose I could check all the literature those people send me all the time...........

Don't think I could make it to Santa Barbara.

[Myrtle Groggins]

Reviews of Stephanie's play. If you follow the links, there are two nice photos accompanying these articles.


From the LA Times:

March 2, 2007


THEATER BEAT
Three sisters and a funeral in ‘The Memory of Water’

Parenthood is a dubious gift in Shelagh Stephenson's funny, tragic play. Plus, "Mommy! Mommy! The Musical! … Musical!" and more.

Parenthood is the dubious gift that keeps on giving in "The Memory of Water," Shelagh Stephenson's funny, tragic and achingly eloquent portrait of three sisters returning to their home in northern England for their mother's funeral.

In Jenny Sullivan's handsome staging for Santa Barbara's Ensemble Theatre Company, pitch-perfect performances quickly differentiate the personalities of Stephenson's dysfunctional siblings and draw us into the charged eruptions that shatter their uneasy truces.

Stephanie Zimbalist solidly anchors the piece as caustic, imperious Mary, an accomplished doctor whose career ambition has displaced other fulfillment. Her tentative human contact is typified in a dead-end love affair with a married colleague, Mike (Mitchell McClean).

Insecure and resentful of Mary's success, the more domesticated Teresa (Laurie Walters) runs a flaky health-supplement business with her husband (Leonard Kelly-Young). As the narcissistic, self-destructive rebel Catherine, Emma-Jane Huerta exudes hilariously tacky charisma mixed with touching vulnerability.

Keenly observed comic details skillfully balance the grim backdrop, particularly in the razor-sharp first act. But in overly indulging the broodier second half, pacing and energy flag.

Still the play's resonant central metaphor ironically taps one of Teresa's crank homeopathic theories that even when separated from complex solutions, water molecules can retain trace properties — or, in popular bumper-sticker parlance, if it's not one thing, it's your mother.
— Philip Brandes


"The Memory of Water," Alhecama Theatre, 914 Santa Barbara St., Santa Barbara. 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays. Ends March 11. $25-37. [phone]. Running time: 2 hours, 30 minutes.

www.calendarlive.com/stage/reviews/cl-et-stage2mar02,0,5219890.story

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From the Montecito Journal:

On Stage
By Steven Libowitz

Close to Home

It would be nice to report that Stephanie Zimbalist’s Santa Barbara debut this month in Ensemble Theatre Company’s production of Shelagh Stephenson’s “The Memory of Water” is nothing but a joyous occasion. But the truth is it’s also a sad case of life imitating art.

Zimbalist – perhaps still best known for her stint as Laura Holt in the 1982-87 TV series “Remington Steele” – plays Mary, the “paranoid” sister in a family of three women who have returned to their birth home in the north of England for the funeral of their mother. Zimbalist’s mother, who was also named Stephanie and who lived in Solvang with her husband of 51 years, the actor Efram Zimbalist, Jr., passed away on February 5 after a two-year battle with lung cancer.

In fact, her mother’s illness is the reason the younger Stephanie Zimbalist – who last summer turned down a plum role in the national touring company of “Tea at Five” because she didn’t want to be so far away – decided to accept the role in the first place.

“I took this job to be closer to my mother as she was declining,” Zimbalist said over the telephone just prior to resuming rehearsals late last week. “It’s fifteen minutes to my parents’ house, door to door.”

It’s virtually impossible to imagine taking on any acting gig let alone one so close to the bone at the same time you’re actually grieving for your own mother. And Zimbalist admitted she hasn’t let herself dwell on the similarities between the role and her own life beyond what she needs to perform the part. Asked whether rehearsing the show is helping her move through her own pain, she begged off the question.

“I couldn’t even begin to tell you,” she says. “I couldn’t possibly be that far away from it to even assess it at this point. I can’t tell you what I’m going through, and I’m not even going to start….But I will say I’m not about to act out my feelings. What we do as artists is take in our lives and filter on stage what we need to. Nobody will get the full force of my grief, or feel what I’m going through. There’s no way. You wouldn’t be able to understand what I was saying if I let myself go.”

But, Zimbalist says, she never even gave a second thought to dropping out of the play, as she remembered what happened on a much smaller scale several years ago.

“My sweet, sweet dog was killed in front of me by a coyote three weeks before I was to play a dog, Sylvia, in the first series of productions outside of the original in New York,” she recalls. “I called up and said ‘I can’t do this.’ But then (my dog) came to me and said ‘I will guide you.’ So I called them back and told them I had to do it. That’s why I didn’t even try to get out of this one. We were beginning our third week of rehearsal and I couldn’t let my fellow actors down. But I also have the faith that if it isn’t my mother that will be guiding me, another power will.”

At least she’ll have a close friend nearby throughout the production. By her count, “Memory” marks her ninth collaboration with the director, Jenny Sullivan, an association that began with the 1989 play “The Baby Dance,” written for Zimbalist and Linda Purl.

“All of the ‘Baby Dancers’ have stayed in very close touch,” Zimbalist says. “Jenny and I have so much in common in our lives – we’re both children of performers and huge dog nuts – that it’s almost like she’s directing herself through me. I’m just the vehicle through which she breathes herself on the stage.”
Meanwhile, early rehearsals for “Memory” have also resulted in another, more unexpected trip down memory lane beyond friends and family. It turns out that before she began her professional acting career, the 18-year-old Zimbalist was a budding singer, taking after her paternal grandmother, the soprano Alma Gluck, who at the peak of her career was one of the world’s most successful opera singers. Zimbalist auditioned for Martial Singher, at the time the head of the vocal department at the Curtis Institute of Music (where Efram Sr., a virtuoso violinist, was director) and an instructor at the Music Academy of the West, which led to her becoming a student of famed singer Natalie Bodanya here in Montecito.

“I started in the fall of 1975 and studied on and off with her for six years,” Zimbalist recalls. “So it’s truly a lovely, lovely homecoming to be rehearsing for this play in the here at the Music Academy at the Singher studio, no less.”

It was also on the Music Academy campus that Efram, Sr., heard Stephanie sing formally for the first and only time. “He told me that day that first and foremost I should sing for my own pleasure,” Zimbalist says. “And that’s what I do.”

Indeed, while she believes she could have enjoyed a career in music herself, Zimbalist had no desire to compete with her grandmother’s legacy.

“She was the first artist to sell a million records,” she says. “She sang with [Enrico] Caruso, and was a very big force in the music world – when her dog ran away in New York, it was on the front page of The New York Times. So the footsteps were too big. I couldn’t line up and try to follow that. I didn’t want to debut ‘Mimi’ at the Met and have some critics dig up her notices and compare. I didn’t need any of that….So I decided to take another path.”

That route soon led her, of course, to the starring role on the popular “Remington Steele” series, which she blesses today for “giving me my solvency” but remembers best for beginning a lasting relationship with her “beloved” hairdresser Dorothy Fox, “who is like a second mother to me.” When the subject series comes up, she interrupts the interviewer before the question is even posed, interjecting: “Just so you know, the last episode on that was in December of 1986, so my memories are dim…I’ve only seen one episode since we finished and that was only because I had to do the voiceover for the DVD….I’ve done a lot of work since then.”

And it’s true. Her list of credits in film, TV and on the stage goes on for pages, and includes appearing opposite Anthony Hopkins in “The Tempest,” as Varya in “The Cherry Orchard” with Alfred Molina, and with her father, who starred on TV’s “FBI” for years, in Tennessee Williams’s “The Night of the Iguana.” The latter is one of half a dozen shows she’s starred in at the Rubicon Theatre in Ventura, less than an hour’s drive from her home in Los Angeles.

Given her current situation, Zimbalist isn’t willing to commit to returning to the Ensemble after “Memory” closes on March 11. Nor will she even think about the idea of another TV series, not because she’s loath to return to the format but because, she says, such a gig is nearly out of the question for a non-A-list actor.

“There might have been a time right after Remington Steele I could have entertained the idea, but I didn’t want to go right back into another series,” she says. “And now it’s gone. And there’s no point in barking up a tree you can’t climb.”

“The Memory of Water” runs from February 15 to March 11. It plays Tuesday to Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 2 pm and 7 pm. Tickets cost $25 to $37. For more info call 962-8606.

www.montecitojournal.net/archive/13/7/771/

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Here's the theatre's website, also with a lovely picture and information about the play:

www.ensembletheatre.com/nowplaying.htm

[Ace]

LOL! GMTA. I was just posting those two articles on Yahoo: Steelewatchers and was going to cut and paste them over here.

Thanks.

[Ace]

More reviews:

Ventura County Star: 'Water' pours on the comedy, low and high, with superb cast

By Rita Moran, Arts writer
February 22, 2007



"The Memory of Water" sprinkles lots of laughs into a somber situation. Playwright Shelagh Stephenson grew up in England's North Country, bordering in part on Scotland, and brings a Celtic sense of hyper-reality to her characters, splicing together emotions that seem to contradict each other but are really facets of the same intensity. Her characters are typical folks who leap to life when confronted with the death of their mother, whose spirit visits them to defend her part in their scattered memories.

A superb cast, under the direction of Jenny Sullivan, brings three sisters, their mother and the men in their lives into focus in the sometimes bizarre extremes of hilarity and anger. Each sister's memories of her childhood differ from the others, and the mother's differs from them all. After a convoluted day of revelations and released passions, they come to a fragile understanding that there is some truth in what each remembers, along with some salving fantasy.


Stephanie Zimbalist, often seen in Rubicon Theatre productions in Ventura, is leading the cast in the Ensemble Theatre Company production in Santa Barbara, continuing her stage association with Sullivan, who has frequently directed at the Rubicon.

Zimbalist plays Mary, a doctor preoccupied with a patient whose memory has been totally wiped out but who will, she feels, recover. While her professional work is fascinating, she is also involved in a five-year relationship with a married doctor with a wife and three kids.

Teresa (Laurie Waters) is the "proper" sibling, who grew up in the shadow of the accomplished Mary and has organized her life with exceptional precision, even into finding her second husband, Frank, through a newspaper ad and putting him to work as her partner in a natural-products business that requires him to be on the road a lot trying to sell products in which he has no interest.

Totally unorganized is Catherine (Emma-Jane Huerta), a waifish, walking jumble of missteps, from picking the wrong men to picking the really wrong clothes.

It's not hard to see why the sisters would have different recollections of their childhood, employing as they must totally different filters. Trying to cope with the women as they bounce from one emotional extreme to another are Mary's Mike (Mitchell McLean) and Teresa's Frank (Leonard Kelly-Young.

Crowded as they all are into the departed mum's bedroom, they have to deal not only with their own problems, but also with everybody else's. Is Mary pregnant, and how does her past play into how she feels about that?

Is Mike the father, and why wouldn't he be? Can Teresa cope with the turmoil around her while still keeping a thumb on the life she's built? Will Frank give up a dream of a different, more compatible life? Will Catherine survive the battering she gives her body with a series of reefers, alcohol and whatever else is handy?

All of this sounds like the makings of tragedy, but in hands of Stephenson and the cast, it's comedy, low and high.

Zimbalist is thoughtful, stubborn and ultimately very strong as Mary learns from her past and present and is about to move on. Walters handles with ease a zany transformation from controlled to falling-down drunk after tippling and puffing on the substances her siblings have handy. Huerta is a hoot as the totally helpless but hyper-active Catherine, always on the edge of disintegration and pushed over it when her latest boyfriend dumps her over the phone.

The highlight scene has the sisters, their men and even their mum all scrumming over the mother's wardrobe of mostly gaudy clothes as they try to decide what's worth donating and what's total junk, something like the decisions they'll try to make over their family memories.

Bairbre Dowling as Vi, the mother, waltzes through the scenes in a crinoline-pouffed aqua taffeta dress and white gloves, remembering the happy times her daughters don't, as intent on smoothing things over in death as she may have been in life. It's a delicate dance, done with palpable charm.

McLean, in the less-defined role as Mike, manages to bring a forthright ardor and some humor to his role as a man not readily burdened by guilt. Kelly-Young is touching, and funny, as the taciturn but gently complex Frank.

Costumes, particularly those of the sisters and mother, are delightfully character-driven, with Catherine seldom venturing out of her miniskirts, boots and generally "chippy" togs. The set, dominated by mum's bed, also includes a window through which snow can be seen, and patterned lighting that evokes the flowing memories of the play.

Some in Friday's opening night audience grumbled about the length of the play, which at about 2 1/2 hours is not extraordinary, though there is a sense that we're seeing and hearing some of the same foibles again because they are funny, not because they're needed for the storyline. But Stephenson's clever and psychologically astute script wins out over such quibbles.


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A Mother Runs through Them

By Charles Donelan, February 22, 2007
The Memory of Water. At Alhecama Theatre,
Friday, February 16. Shows through March 11.

Reviewed by Charles Donelan



Shelagh Stephenson’s The Memory of Water is a difficult play that offers multiple opportunities for actors to shine. The show, which won the Olivier Award for best new comedy in 2000, has since gone on to attract attention for its strong, character-driven exploration of three sisters’ feelings at the death of their mother. During the course of a snowy winter’s day and night, as they reminisce, sort through their mother’s flamboyant wardrobe, drink, and smoke, the sisters are visited by two men and a ghost. Stephanie Zimbalist plays Mary, the sister who has become an important medical doctor doing neurological research. Her portrayal of the stereotypical sacrifice of family for career is nuanced and psychologically acute. In her scenes with her married lover, a fellow doctor named Mike, Zimbalist keeps one guessing about what her character’s next reaction or transformation will be. Westmont College’s Mitchell Thomas, listed in the program as Mitchell McLean, as Mike does a terrific job keeping up as Zimbalist builds from a simmering initial appearance in a hat and shades to a full boil of dramatic energy.

Laurie Walters is Teresa, the responsible married sister who owns a health food store with her laconic husband, Fred (Leonard Kelly-Young). Teresa rockets from obsessively arranging her mother’s impending funeral in the opening scene to ultimately drunkenly parading her intimate knowledge of sordid family secrets. Walters finds a steady balance between Teresa’s alternating bouts of utter recklessness and stressed-out self-control.

As Catherine, the youngest sister, Emma-Jane Huerta creates a whirlwind of intoxication, neuroses, and one-liners, all delivered in a spot-on accent. Bairbre Dowling brings otherworldly restraint and dignity to her portrayal of Vi, the ghost of the mother whose influence underlies virtually everything that happens.

Director Jenny Sullivan has done an admirable job with the material, which, for all its fluency, remains a sometimes perplexing mix of comedy and tragedy, with too much weighty metaphysical speculation thrown in by its scientifically minded author. For theatergoers interested in seeing adults acting the way they do when confronted by the death of a parent — which is to say, irrationally — this is a brave contribution to the literature of grief.

[Myrtle Groggins]

Oowwwww! Thanks so much. This is great for SZ. Lots of publicity.