Dael Orlandersmith shares intimate details of her dysfunctional childhood in FOREVER (photo by Joan Marcus)
New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 31, $75
nytw.org
Pulitzer Prize finalist Dael Orlandersmith returns to New York Theatre Workshop with the searing Forever, a harrowing, deeply intimate one-woman show about the severely dysfunctional relationship between a daughter and her alcoholic mother. In the semiautobiographical work, Orlandersmith (Yellowman, Monster, The Gimmick) spends a gripping eighty minutes discussing her artistic influences while looking back at damaging scenes from her past as she walks through Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, paying tribute to Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Richard Wright, and other writers and musicians who helped her survive a brutal childhood in Harlem. “All of us have come / All of us who are seeking / have come to be with these people here in Pere Lachaise — who beyond our parents helped us give birth to ourselves,” she says. Statuesque and elegant in a long black dress, her braided hair falling over her shoulders and reaching toward her hips, she recalls a broken friendship with a local tomboy, being beaten by her mother over math homework, and how she felt when her mother tells her she is “fat / hateful / disgusting.” She shares her physical and psychological pain with the audience, making direct, lingering eye contact that is both soothing and uncomfortable. “I can’t believe I still can feel her slap. She’s been gone / dead / over twenty years but I can still see / feel / hear her laughing,” she says. Orlandersmith tells the story with a lyrical, poetic rhythm that is captivating and unique. She describes her Caesarian birth thusly: “October 29, 1959 / I was torn from blood/guts/water / Spanked into consciousness / Spanked into living.” Later she adds, “A scar I made a long time ago coming through you / I stare at it / Wondering how I could have been born from it / How I could have been born from you.”
Dael Orlandersmith’s tale of her relationship with her mother is both harrowing and uplifting (photo by Joan Marcus)
About midway through Forever, which is calmly directed by Neel Keller, with excellent lighting by Mary Louise Geiger and sound by Adam Phalen, Orlandersmith relates a long, agonizing episode from her childhood in nerve-racking detail, one of the most powerful and frightening things you’re ever likely to experience from a show; it’s difficult to watch, but you won’t be able to avert your eyes from hers, finalizing an unbreakable bond between performer and audience that will stay with you long after you leave the theater. Ultimately, she tries to find closure as she revisits her mother’s death. Forever is both heartbreaking and uplifting, a shocking, poetic exploration of family, memory, and the ties that bind; it was particularly poignant the night we saw it, on the eve of Mother’s Day. Before and after the show, people are invited to write their own tributes to those they’ve lost on notecards they can tape to the long, narrow bulletin boards lining the side walls, and following the show, attendees can walk around Takeshi Kata’s central staging area and check out dozens of Orlandersmith’s family photographs on similar boards around the set. The notecards and photographs are a brilliant touch, a physical evocation of how the past embraces and surrounds both the audience and the performer’s emotional experience, providing yet more intimacy and reminding you of your own relationships. (The May 20 show will be followed by a discussion with photographers James and Karla Murray and NYU adjunct professor Cynthia Copeland, moderated by Alexander Santiago-Jirau, who will also lead a Shop Talk after the May 27 show.)