Opening night of Winter’s Bench, Mike Kenny’s new play, at 24th Street Theatre, was a treat for those who love smaller theatrical productions. This is the 39th year of the 24th Street Theatre’s existence as a cultural landmark in Los Angeles and it was duly celebrated by its executive director Jay McAdams with some happy announcements before the 60-minute long one-woman play was staged. The community has been most supportive of the work of the 24th Street Theatre, which began with the encouragement of Todd Black, the Dean of the School of Dramatic Arts at USC. The 24th Street Theatre Company has finally purchased the old carriage house building on 24th Street in Los Angeles and acquired the building directly across the street as a theatre annex to be named the Black Box.
Mike Kenny (born in the Welsh borders, with a Welsh mother) is one of England’s leading writers specializing in young people’s theatre. his plays are performed regularly throughout the UK and all over the world. His Olivier Award-winning adaptation of The Railway Children has had several successful revivals on London stage. Some of his best plays for younger audiences with Three Wise Monkeys and Electric Darkness.
Winter’s Bench is all about a bench in an English park where an old woman named Gladys frequents to talk to a very old tree. From the start, that woman played by wonderful Anne Gee Byrd offers she a reflective monologue about herself and her many visits over the years since her childhood of visiting this abandoned park and the importance of one solitary tree in the park. This short play is a meditative piece focused on memory, aging, and the cycle of life and renewal.
Directed by Debbie Devine, this play presents the ruminations of an elderly woman recalling her childhood memories of herself, her mentally-unstable mother, her stern grandmother and het younger baby brother – in the context of visits to this abandoned park which was once well maintained and full of beautiful trees. As the play opens, Gladys forces open the locked gate to the park which appears closed and sees that her favorite tree is marked for removal. Gladys has not visited the park for some time, but she never discloses why she stopped coming to the park.
First Gladys introduces herself with her own name of Gladys, which she finds unusual and certainly not a name given to children any more. Gladys is now 88 and trying to reconstruct memories of her childhood in relation to this park which she once frequented. In the park is a huge, old tree and, under it, a wooden bench that was given to the park by her great-grandfather, a man named Hargreaves. On the back of the bench is a plate inscribed with his name. Gladys begins to tell us about her family and her first memory of the bench in the park where her mother accidentally left her as an infant. This traumatic incident seems to have shaped here relationship to that place in her memory forever. Often her mentally-unstable mother would bring her to the park and as a child she grew fond of her attachment to this special tree, which she believed talked to her.
Gladys tells us about her difficult upbringing about her consistently rocky relationship with her new-born brother who seems to have created a wedge between herself and her mother. When her mother was put in a psychiatric hospital for a while, Gladys would visit the park with her grandmother and also sometimes alone. When her mother did returns from a stay in a mental hospital, it seems for a moment that the family briefly was reunited on the bench under the old tree. But that glimmer of happiness did not last. Her mother was sent back to the hospital and Gladys provides no illumination as to what happened to her mother, her brother, or her grandmother are left without explanation. Gladys has pulled out memories related to the tree but is unsure if her memory is completely reliable or she is filling in missing pieces with some fictional additions.
There is no real turning point in Gladys’ narrative: we never learn why she stopped coming to the park or what prompted her return. If we believe that our childhood experiences shape our lives later, this play explores that theme but without any easy answers. Gladys lines up memories only to transition to another recollection without exploring any deeper into her past. These do not explain anything about her later life except for a sense of the past is gone and, like all the trees in the park, the memories themselves will eventually be erased. As she ponders this, she concludes that there is never be another young girl named Gladys.
Winter’s Bench is a slow-moving play and feels like a somewhat disjointed conversation with an elderly person who conjures up childhood memories because they is little in the contemporary present time as powerful to discuss. This is truly an actor’s play and the fine performance of Gladys by Anne Gee Byrd carries us through memory lane focused on her stage presence. Added the performance is the lone flute of Shih-Wee-Wu, representing the spirit of the tree. Keith Mitchell’s scenic design includes the huge trunk of an ancient tree with its branches stretching to the theatre ceiling and falling leaves scattered and occasionally falling. Dan Weingarten’s lighting is focused on the tree and the bench as the compelling central images in the park. To augment the story telling of Gladys, Eve Mazarra and Matthew Hill have provided a background video display with images that attempt to contextualize Glady’s memories as she recounts them. They really don’t add much to our focus on the voice of Anne Gee Byrd as she carries us down memory lane.
I am not sure what Freud would say about Gladys and her memories. Selective they are and certainly she seems resentful that the tree does not “talk” to her anymore in her old age. We can’t recreate childhood from memories alone and to dwell in the past may seem like a safe place to go but it can be disappointing as well. There are objects from our childhood that are place-holders in memory and we may treasure them. But often strong memories also have bitter roots and we get a taste of them with Gladys’ mental journey into her past life. Winter’s Bench is a character study and it gets a bit of closure at the play’s end with Gladys’ hearing a mother calling out the name of young daughter – and that could be her own.
Winter’s Bench will be on stage at the 24th Street Theatre in Los Angeles on Saturday, 8 pm, Sun., 2 pm, Monday Sept 7 and 14. 8 pm; through October 25. The 24th Street Theatre is located at 1117 West 24th Street, LA. For tickets: www.24thstreet.org.
