The Time of Our Lives: International Festival of Reminiscence Theatre (review)

The Time Of Our Lives: International Festival Of Reminiscence Theatre. Age Exchange Theatre, London. 16-19 March 2000.

Older men and women from South Africa, Taiwan, Germany, and Ohio crowded the narrow, twisting streets of Blackheath, in southeast London. They were gathered for a four day festival of senior and intergenerational theatre groups from around the world focused on reminiscence, hosted by the Age Exchange Theatre. Showcasing performances by fourteen companies from eight different countries, the festival brought together an impressive and diverse range of performing styles and themes.

Reminiscence theatre is built of performers' memories and is used to create a living chronicle to be shared with their communities. Reminiscence theatre affirms the importance of elders in a community by presenting them and their stories as invaluable links between past, present, and future. In this country, the term "reminiscence theatre" has not yet taken firm hold, although the work of building theatre from memory is common to such groups as Elders Share the Arts (New York City), Stagebridge (Oakland, California), and the Grandparents Living Theater (Columbus, Ohio). Footsteps of the Elders, also based in Columbus, Ohio, and representatives of the Extended Run Players (San Antonio, Texas) and the Encore Theater (Eugene, Oregon), comprised the American presence at the festival.

While the festival was exceedingly well organized, it suffered the usual challenges of an international festival. Language barriers were particularly pronounced, as much of the work was based on intricate personal and cultural memories. Festival sponsors provided enormously helpful synopses of the plays, but I still found myself lost during several performances, including Erinnerungsteater Wien's If I Had a Wish, whose wistful and haunting stage imagery was one of the best of the festival. The other common but significant challenge of the festival was adapting regular season performances to the festival's time and space requirements. Some groups cut and pasted their productions, and occasionally the fractured context of the works added to the language difficulties. Other groups chose to create new pieces for the festival--a considerable undertaking for groups with scant resources. The three performances I have chosen to highlight here represent a cross section of performance styles at the festival, ranging from minimalist presentations of reminiscences by amateur performers to highly polished presentations by professional actors.

Our Century and Us, by the Age Exchange Theatre's Good Companions, was simultaneously the simplest in intention and most elegant in presentation of the nearly dozen performances I was able to attend at the festival. Using minimal props (a piano was the only set piece), the Good Companions shared their personal memories of the last century. Director Pam Schweitzer clearly found a way to make the amateur performers feel fully at ease on stage, for in spite of their lack of theatrical experience, the Good Companions had a remarkably focused stage presence.

Our Century and Us was an amalgam of performers' memories of the twentieth century ranging from visions of rocking horses and zeppelins to dreams of financial bounty and a peaceful world for their grandchildren in the years still to come. In between the play's bookend scenes of earliest memories and wishes for the future, the Good Companions looked to school days, first jobs, some not so fond memories of the war, difficulties and joys of marriage, children, and working life, and the physical and emotional challenges of late life.

The linear structure was a common one for reminiscence-based theatre groups, but the Good Companions boiled their narrative down to the most compelling stories and presented them in a fresh and charming theatrical style. For example, in a scene of ice skating memories that illustrated the performers' growth from childhood to adolescence, the Good Companions floated around the small stage space as though on a skating rink. They were a little uncertain at first, at first stumbling and then suddenly rigid. Slowly, and with great fluidity, the skaters' movements became confident as...