Erin Leddy pays tribute to her grandmother in experimental solo show at 59E59 (photo by Kate Sanderson Holly)
59E59 Theaters
59 East 59th St. between Park and Madison Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through August 19, $25
212-279-4200
www.59e59.org
www.hand2mouththeatre.org
Built around recordings Erin Leddy made of her grandmother when they lived together for a year in 2001, Leddy’s debut solo piece, My Mind Is Like an Open Meadow, is an intriguing multidisciplinary show than can be as charming and fanciful as it is inscrutable and self-indulgent. A presentation of Portland’s Hand2Mouth theater ensemble, My Mind Is Like an Open Meadow explores aging and memory using dance, song, spoken word, and audience confrontation as Leddy has a conversation with her grandmother, actress Sarah Braveman, whose prerecorded voice emerges from a boombox in one corner of Christopher Kuhl’s claustrophobic set. The self-reflexive, hyper-aware work comments on itself as well as the audience of forty people in the small space at 59E59, creating an at times dreamlike atmosphere as Leddy sings Fleetwood Mac’s “Gypsy” (“And a memory is all that’s left for you now”), draws varicose veins on her legs, rolls around on the floor, asks an unseen crew member for some Miles Davis music, and goes face-to-face with people in the front row, even spitting seeds at one empty chair. She occasionally slaps her body and dons an old woman’s wig, though it’s not always clear why. Kuhl’s inventive lighting and Casi Pacilio’s expressive sound design nearly steal the show, which features an original score by Portland band Ash Black Bufflo and songs cowritten by Leddy with Holcombe Waller. Directed by Hand2Mouth head Jonathan Walters, the sixty-five-minute production is a welcome, if frustrating, alternative to conventional theater, an unusual, intimate, confounding, offbeat, and touching tribute to a beloved relative. My Mind Is Like an Open Meadow continues at 59E59 through August 19, with special $10 tickets for Thursday’s show, which will be followed by a talk back with the company.