Breadcrumbs - Talk about into the Woods

 

    From childhood do you remember the story of Hansel and Gretel?  How two siblings

 venture into the woods leaving behind a trail of bread pieces to guide them back home?

Ah fortune! Imagine the anxiety, the distress, they must feel when some forest critter (I forget which one) eats their roadmap back to the safety of hearth and home.

In the play Breadcrumbs, actress Virginia Wall Gruenert convincingly suggests some of the same horror the siblings must have felt lost in the darkness of the woods. As the aging writer, Alida she’s somewhat asea, adrift by the onset of dementia.

As the play opens we see her in an almost sleepwalking state, following along on a darkened stage past an string of tall black trees whose images appear on a line of delicate material that shivers in the breeze. With each step she pulls of a post it note that holds one word. After repeating it to herself, she casually lets it fall to the floor.

As a writer words are very important to her and her ever growing loss of memory makes it difficult to continue writing what is probably going to be her last work. If you’ve ever forgotten a word in the middle of a conversation, you know what she’s feeling, but on a much larger scale.

By happenstance, Beth (Erika Cuenca), the practitioner who gives her the diagnosis she so dreads, is soon fascinated by her and volunteers to help her continue to write her book. One of the attendant traits associated with dementia is paranoia, something the cantankerous-to begin-with Alida is showing by her distrust of Beth’s  intentions. “Is she here to steal my book?” She cnosiders the possibility

Playwright Jennifer Haley eschews a linear story here as her narrative meanders into alternate stories, then back again to the main one. The audience follows back in time to Alida’s childhood where we pick up clues to her backstory as Cuenca becomes her mother and Gruenert the child. The roles change without warning or clear demarcation, but the narrative is still relatively easy to follow.

In one of these flashbacks, we hear of the mansion of the man her mother hopes to marry, where untoward things are remembered as having gone on in the basement. Just like the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel, the mansion seems a respite from the terror of the woods, but it's really the basis of Alida’s childhood trauma.

After seeing Gruenert in several plays through the years, I expected great theater artistry and boy does she deliver. As Alida, she manages to convey her fears of memory loss and not being able to finish her book, her distrust of Beth’s intentions, her awareness of her inability to function sufficiently on her own, her neediness and her complex, almost symbiotic relationship with Beth.

Ash Alida ,she dresses drably in a neutral pair of pants and just as colorless top. This is in contrast to Beth's vibrant, flowing and colorful ensemble which she wears with the grace and poise of a seasoned ballerina. While Alida’s gait is heavy and plodding, Beth’s are lithe and graceful.