A reclusive fiction writer is diagnosed with dementia and must depend upon a troubled young caretaker to complete her autobiography. In a symbiotic battle of wills, the two delve into the dark woods of the past, unearthing a tragedy that shatters their notions of language, loneliness and essential self.
Citations
Production at Theater 150 in Ojai CA selected as a Highlight of 2011 in LA Theater by the LA Stage times.
Productions
July 2011
Theater 150, Ojai CA
directed by Jessica Kubzansky
July-August 2010
Contemporary American Theater Festival, Shepherdstown WV
directed by Laura Kepley
October 2010
Manbites Dog Theatre, Durham NC
directed by Jeff Storer
Workshops
July 2008
PlayPenn, Philadelphia, PA
directed by Katie Pearl
Readings
March 2010
The Theater @ Boston Court, Pasadena CA
directed by Michael Michetti
April 2009
Naked Angels, New York NY
directed by Laura Kepley
April 2009
Geva Theatre Center, Rochester NY
directed by Marge Betley
August 2008
Reading, The Victory Theatre Center, Burbank CA
directed by Abigail Marateck
Breadcrumbs was adapted from a previous play:
Gingerbreadhouse
Productions
October 2005
Selected scenes presented in Threshold, An Evening of New Work, The Public Theater, New York City
directed by Laura Kepley
May 2005
Workshop Production, New Plays Festival, Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium, Providence RI
directed by Alex Torra
Awards
April 2005
Weston Award for Drama, Brown University
Joelson Prize in Creative Writing, Brown University
Theater 150, Ojai CAJuly 2011
Directed by Jessica Kubzansky
Cast: Anne Gee Byrd, Brook Masters
Photos by Jeremy Pivnick
Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Shepherdstown WVJuly 2010
Directed by Laura Kepley
Cast: Helen-Jean Arthur, Eva Kaminsky
Photos by Judy Olsen
Manbites Dog Theatre, Durham NCOctober 2010
Directed by Jeff Storer
Cast: Marcia Edmundson, Chaunesti Webb
Photos by Alan Dehmer
PlayPenn Rehearsal, Philadelphia PAJuly 2008
Directed by Katie Pearl
Cast: Kristy Chouinere, Ceal Phelan, Susan Wilder
LA Stage Times
Read an article about the writing of Breadcrumbs in the LA Stage Times: Haley Traces Breadcrumbs at Ojai's Theater 150
Theater 150, Ojai CA
Reviewed by Dany Margolies
Backstage
JULY 13, 2011
Though most plays depend on words, words are immutably the crux of Jennifer Haley's West Coast premiere play. The telling of stories and memories, lies and truths, relies on our words. And like the breadcrumbs dropped in a fairy tale to find a way back to the familiar, words are dropped along the life path of the protagonist-author in this two-hander. Those breadcrumbs, however, are being pecked at and removed from her memory by Alzheimer's disease.
Alida (Anne Gee Byrd) visits a clinic for a diagnosis, where she meets an inept, patronizing nurse's aide, Beth (Brook Masters). The needy Beth soon drops by Alida's home, ostensibly to return materials Alida may have left there. The two come to rely on each other for care and a feeling of purpose. The actors begin to fill in Alida's childhood memories, as Byrd also plays young Alida and Masters plays Alida's dysfunctional mother.
As the adult, Byrd descends into Alida's "infinite, indifferent darkness," clearly evidencing the disease while maintaining a glorious intransigent dignity. As the child, Byrd shows a youthfully pliable physicality as she crawls on the ground through imaginary tree roots and curls into a little-girl ball. But Byrd's main childlike choice, an insistent curiosity, offers the sharpest depiction of the young persona—mostly because it's an interesting characteristic of a healthy child and because it would have been a building block of the adult Alida. Masters matches Byrd's energy, limning a clingy Beth whom we like despite her annoying boyfriend problems.
Jessica Kubzansky's flawlessly vivid direction gives this devastating play about real characters a fairy-tale feel that almost soothes the audience while shaking us. Susan Gratch's set of slate-gray, filled with words written in chalk, embraces a diamond-shaped stage that brings the play into the audience. Jeremy Pivnick's emerald and salmon lights turn from "reality" to childhood memory. Madeline Mikkelson's costumes enable instantaneous scene changes.
Among Haley's most interesting ideas, she occasionally ensures that the audience doesn't trust its own ears. Who is lying, who is demented, who misheard, who is mistaken? It may be only words, but words are all we have to take our hearts away.
Contemporary American Theatre Festival
Reviewed by by Lorraine Treanor
DC Theatre Scene
July 15, 2010
“Words, words, words,” Hamlet sneered at Polonius, who had asked him what he was reading, but to Alida (Helen-Jean Arthur), a brilliant writer now in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, they are the guideposts which will keep her memories aglimmer even as her synapses misfire. They are, to the fiercely independent and private Alida, the equivalent of Gretel's breadcrumbs: a device to keep wicked forces at bay, and to show the way home.
Photo by Judy Olsen
They are also, of course, the tools by which Jennifer Haley's heartbreakingly beautiful new play, now receiving its world premiere at the Contemporary American Theater Festival, uses to (in Dylan Thomas'excellent phrase) “rage against the dying of the light.” Stories are the ways we explain ourselves to ourselves, and thus eventually the way we become ourselves.
We see this immediately, as Beth (Eva Kaminsky), a good-natured but somewhat dim nurse's aide, first realizes that she has been writing up the wrong file when she calls Alida by the wrong name. Later, they tell each other stories – thinly disguised versions of their own lives – in the guise of a memory test. Beth's story is tragic: booted out of the family home at fifteen, she has spent the remainder of her life trying to find someone who loves her, so that she can love herself. Alida's story is a little more complicated.
She tells it in dribs and drabs, each memory, reluctantly conjured, moving us closer to the mystery which is at the heart of the play and her life. Her version of the story of Gretel (Hansel, being redundant, has been removed from the scene) is a truncated one, which ends as Gretel encounters the witch in the candy home (featuring, in Alida's version, walls of “chocolate flesh…and a mucous-striped roof'). So, of course, it is with us. Our travels end at a place, as Hamlet says “from whose bourne no traveler returns.”
Haley's particular strategy in taking us with Alida is to intersperse encounters between Alida and Beth – who has decided to assist Alida in writing her memoirs – with scenes between Alida as a child (Arthur) and her mother (Kaminsky). Alida's mother, like Beth, seeks to define herself by the men who keep her, and perversely chases after drunks, liars and abusers in the hope of finding love and security. As we delve deeper and deeper into Alida's childhood, we move closer and closer to the secret which animates her life: the secret she intends not to reveal.
There is a present-day conflict as well. Like many sufferers of dementia, Alida recalls the past as a way to keep it alive in the face of her evaporating mental abilities. But at the same time Alida is horrified not only by the past but by the prospect of sharing it with anyone else. (Discovering that someone has posted a Wikipedia entry for her sends her into paroxysm of rage.) As Alida's mind bubbles away, Beth alternately becomes her lifeline and her mortal enemy.
In less competent hands, the rapid interplay of past and present would promote only confusion, but Arthur and Kaminsky do full justice to Haley's daring technique. I cannot say enough about Kaminsky's subtle craftsmanship. Beth is a desperate social failure, awash in loneliness and shipwrecked on a loveless sea. Alida's mother is a desperate social failure, awash in loneliness and shipwrecked on a loveless sea but putting on an optimistic face, to keep her daughter's spirits up. In Kaminsky's hands, these are two entirely distinct women, and you can tell at every instant which one she is. It is masterfully subtle work, done by an actor in full command of everything in her toolbox.
Arthur has one character separated by perhaps seventy years, and with great specificity she invokes both Alidas. We can see the roots of the elderly Alida – an old-school toughie who insists that Beth do her research in the library, not on the Internet – in the young Alida, whose sharply-worded questions make us understand the doomed nature of her mother's quest for happiness through men, even if the mother does not. Arthur's astute, knowing portrayal of this brilliant, difficult woman is essential to the play's success.
As an added bonus, we get superb technical work. Director Laura Keply employs laser-precision timing to heighten tension without ever sacrificing clarity. Robert Klingelhoefer's set and Colin Bills' lighting design invoke not only time and place but the play's moral landscape perfectly. And as for Matthew R. Nielson's sound – well, to say that this particular sound design is among the Helen Hayes laureate's best ever is like saying a particular Mike Tyson knockout punch is among his best ever. But there it is: Neilsen's sound design is a bath of aural pleasure.
Alida's mystery is revealed to us, but in the end, there is another, deeper mystery which is not. This is the equivalent of being served a lobster by a master chef, and then being given a steak to take home for later. It is an act of creative boldness, to be done only by a playwright in absolute command of her gifts, using artists in absolute command of their own.
Manbites Dog Theatre, Durham NC
Reviewed by Scott Ross
Classical Voice of North Carolina
October 9, 2010
There are few pleasures in a theatre-lover’s life more entrancing than the discovery of a new play that, or a new playwright who, engages mind and heart with equal aplomb. In the exquisite regional premiere of Jennifer Haley’s Breadcrumbs at Manbites Dog Theater, Triangle audiences have a perfect opportunity to encounter both.
A brief two-hander of exceptional grace and emotional power, Breadcrumbs is performed at MbD with passionate yet expertly modulated brio by Marcia Edmundson and Chaunesti Webb and has been directed with un-cloying tenderness and an unerring sense of pace and expressive atmosphere by Jeff Storer. In it, Jennifer Haley probes, with the delicacy of a surgeon and the elegiac lucidity of a true poet, the unforgiving past and the errant nature with which memory parses it. She does so, moreover, by employing — with perfectly formed irony and considerable empathy — the unrelenting spectre of senile dementia.
For Alida, an aging writer, loss of her words is tantamount to living death. For Beth, her sparring-partner, erstwhile caregiver, and initially unwelcome amanuensis, the older woman’s diagnosis precipitates a race run against an implacable, inexorable enemy: to uncover the truth and to separate it from the fictions with which Alida protects herself. While there can of course be no perfect resolution here between encroaching loss and the psychic anguish born both of repressing, and uncovering, painful memories, Haley’s luminously crafted play provides an annealing catharsis tinctured with rue that brings her antagonists, and her audience, to a plangent denouement in which comfort descends in a kind of benediction as vividly depicted as it is impermanent.
A “memory play” in every sense, Breadcrumbs moves backward and forward in time, a temporal structure that allows bits and pieces of truth to accrue in tantalizing, enigmatic glimpses. Haley’s conceit allows Alida to play herself at younger ages and Beth to embody Alida’s mother, in a narrative arc that not only reveals the hidden contours of the older woman’s experience but brings Beth, subtly and without the need for obviousness on the part of the playwright, to an understanding of the parallels between Alida’s past and her own, troubling choices.
In Haley’s sure hands, as in Storer’s, nothing is wasted. Take the Post-It Notes with which Alida begins the play and that carry through the action in surprising yet utterly logical ways: First, as — to use her repeated phrase — points of reference for the audience to work out. Second, as guides to the everyday, placed around Alida’s apartment by Beth as the older woman’s faculties worsen. Third, as notes for the completion of her story that also serve as paths to memory, to be retrieved before, as Alida notes stoically, “my brain turns brown.” And finally, as metaphors for the yellow leaves at which she once grasped and that, in the play’s affecting finale, rain gently down, Alida’s words and memories regained and at the same time, lost to time and infirmity. Alida’s own metaphors have a similar fecundity, as when she imagines herself as Gretel without a Hansel, swallowed up by “an infinite, indifferent darkness.” This is exceptionally rich dramaturgy, refracted through, and enhanced by, imagery of the simplest and yet highest order.
Marcia Edmundson has an exceptionally difficult obligation in Alida, a woman with almost no pleasant contours, and it is a tribute to the actor’s innate skill that we come to care for her and to see her as the product of a past over which she had no control. She is equally striking as the child who is mother to the woman, and as each new layer of emotive skin is both peeled back and completed, her at first unreasonable fury becomes heartbreakingly explicable. Chaunesti Webb is splendid as Beth and even more so as Alida’s mother, each woman growing more aware of herself and the painful decisions she has made (in Beth’s case) or is about to (in the mother’s.) Chaunesti is the poignant violin to Edmundson’s deep cello in this exquisite chamber duet.
Jeff Storer has directed with an extraordinary mix of delicacy and force in exactly the proper measure. When one reflects how easily this material could become lugubrious, not from any inherent flaw in the writing but from the temptation of a lesser talent to orchestrate it in a deathish fashion, Storer’s achievement is all the more remarkable. The director is aided in this as well by Kit Wienert’s delicate, evocative incidental music and by the strikingly effective lighting designs of Andrew Park.
A very special mention must be made of the indispensable contributions to this production of Derrick Ivey, its set and costume designer. I do not know whether the playwright specifies a scenic plan at all like the one displayed here, but Ivey’s fantastic environment limns her play beautifully, with its evocation of a frightful, initially inscrutable yet somehow invitingly enchanted wood, the stuff both of childish terrors and their attendant, unlimited possibility — that “infinite, indifferent darkness” between childish desire and adult reality, which strikes unreasoned fear of the dream even as it liberates the dreamer.
The sort of pleasure Breadcrumbs evinces is rare, in the theatre or anywhere else. Seize it.