{INTANGIBLE} – Finding Balance Between Life, Love and Loss
Intangible: unable to be touched or grasped; not having physical presence.
Dementia, apparently a syndrome, not a disease, can manifest itself in many ways. The program lists 22 signs, most of which separate a victim from awareness, memory, and control.
Brianna Kalisch, Timothy Canali, Mikayla Dinsdale, Maks Turner, Sherese Parris, and Cynthia Shaw
Playwright Brianna Kalisch’s concept of shifting back and forth from real time to memories that manifest as circus/balance acts is effective. Q. (Cynthia Shaw), who fades in and out of self awareness, lives at a care facility. Sometimes she recognizes her visiting children, sometimes she’s agitated by their presence, perceiving them as strangers. Nurse Carol (Sherese Parris) is thoughtful and patient.
Each of Q.’s recollections (give her a name!) arrives with an illuminated juggling ball she retrieves. Flashbacks are played out by circus performers: Mikayla Dinsdale, Maks Turner, Tim Canali and Kalisch herself, on trapeze, rope, tumbling, spinning plates… Q. sees her younger self (pigtails make her look like a little girl, rather than a young woman), her children and her deceased husband. Circus work is accomplished, but there’s too much of it for us to stay with Q.’s trajectory. We don’t hear or see enough from the heroine.
Cynthia Shaw, Mikayla Dinsdale, Maks Turner and Brianna Kalisch
This is compounded lightweight acting. Shaw is credible only during one brief parenthesis when Q.’s daughter, upset with dissolution of a marriage, needs her. Instead of observing the character’s anxiety, fear, anger, helplessness, aphasia, we see a thespian who doesn’t seem to have made internal decisions about the role and/or the results of a director who doesn’t have a handle on the syndrome. As Q. is the play’s central axis, this affects everything.
A worthy effort.
Photos ©Maike Schulz
Opening – Cynthia Shaw as Q.
The Dementia Society of America and Kalisch Productions present
{INTANGIBLE} by Brianna Kalisch
Directed by Felicity Hesed
Theatre Row
410 West 42nd Street
The Dementia Society of America
Our programs bring much-needed education, local resources, and life enrichment to individuals and families impacted by Dementia.
