Do you ever play the memory game with your parents or your siblings? Sometimes things that live so vividly in your mind seem to exist only for you, while others recall events that don't exist in your memories.
In Julia Cho's provocative Winchester House, making its world premiere at the Boston Court Theatre in Pasadena, an Asian American woman is haunted by her childhood memories, memories that she felt she couldn't fully explore until the main participants were dead, dying, or out of her life.
Via (Kimiko Gelman) is a composer of folksy songs, a young woman who seems unable to sustain a real job (as defined by her brother as one that has health benefits) or a romantic relationship. Instead of speaking up, she does destructive things — things that force her significant other to finally break up with her.
We later learn that at one time, she was a girl interested in art and capable of helping a college art history professor, John Bergin (Arye Gross), with research. She had a good relationship with her brother, Ernest (Greg Watanabe), who now acts as a reluctant custodian — visiting her from time to time at a restaurant, making sure she has enough money, but hoping she never comes to his house.
Now in her thirties, a voice from her past calls her to remember things, things that her brother either can't or won't recall.
That voice is an old friend of her father's, John, a fellow faculty member whose wife, Helen (Laura Wernette), is a clever but unfulfilled woman with a British background. They were the couple that Ernest and Via wanted desperately to be like. We know less about Via's father, a distant physics professor (Nelson Mashita), and her mother (Dian Kobayashi), who, because of speech limitations in English, uses Via as a confidante. They are foreign, uncool, and unsophisticated compared to the Bergins.
What we do know is that one day Via came home, her skirt torn, and unable to tell her parents about their friends, the Bergins, and only able to tell her brother the truth. What happened next is unclear, yet the Bergins drift away from Via's family.
Cho's 90-minute intermission-less piece compares the architecture of memories with the frantic, haphazard building that the widow Sarah L. Winchester directed for 38 years, making what is now known as the Winchester Mystery Mansion. Winchester was reportedly told by a fortune-teller that she was cursed because of all the deaths caused by the Winchester rifles; to lift the curse, she must build and build and build. Here, Via is driven away from her parents, her brother, and even romantic relationships because of her experience with one man, John.
Article comments