New Play at AlterTheatre
AlterTheater, San Rafael’s storefront performance group, is now in its third year of independent productions. This year, it’s staging three full-length works, including Catherine’s Care. This is a premiere performance and, says management, “one-and-a -half years in the making.” Program notes summarize that its story “springs from the mind and memories of Catherine, an aging crone stuck in a nursing home against her will.” It continues, “In a world peopled with strangers who seem familiar and crows who sing, Catherine must craft her own reality and hopes and dreams.”

Oh, dear. However, let’s keep watching, and see where it takes us.

Four actors and four musicians are cast in this drama. A drummer opens with the exposition: Catherine’s widowed, her kids are gone, and Judgment Day is coming. Now we see the central character in her hospital bed, surrounded by flashing lights, dissonant music, gyrating figures. An intermittent beep in the background reminds us that this is a hospital. Then there’s a harmonica, a chorus of “Blue Moon” (blue will be a repeating theme,) more lights and dissonance.

Catherine is visited by her daughter, Baby Girl, with whom she argues, insisting that she wants to go home. In a series of violent flashbacks, she’s also visited by the ghost of her husband, Emmy.

Nurse Carol keeps returning to administer meds and to make up the bed with dark blue sheets. Carol has an old grudge against Catherine, dating back to the days when Catherine was her mother’s boss. And Catherine has her own grudges – mainly, that she never traveled.

There are interludes of hymns and a brief turn with Emmy in the guise of a hellfire-raising preacher or a crow. Baby Girl also takes dizzying turns as Catherine’s daughter and as her younger, wilder self.

AlterTheater has given this puzzling play a fine cast. The “aging crone” is played by the wonderfully versatile Carla Spindt, who’s several decades too young for the part, but overcomes that handicap with acting skill. Craig Jessup – locally remembered for his cabaret show with Ruth Hastings and Barry Lloyd –has the indefinite role of Emmy. The multi-talented Tamar Cohn is underutilized as Nurse Carol, and Jenna Johnson takes on the dual characters of Catherine’s daughter and her own young self.

Live music is supplied by Andy Dinsmoor, Mark Malmberg, Daniel Savio, and Robert Ernst, who also wrote the play and asks the audience to “think outside their comfort zones.” Jon Tracy’s direction makes the most of the improvised performance space and the challenge of bringing action to the story of an old lady in a hospital bed.

But a program note also invites audience members to participate in a workshop to further develop this script. Hopefully, the workshop will encourage the playwright to cut the theatrics and wake Catherine up. Until we see her strengths, humor, and humanity, it’s difficult to care about Catherine very much.

Catherine’s Care will be performed at 1557 Fourth Street in San Rafael until Feb. 11. February 15 – 18 it will continue at 1138 Fourth Street (at B.) The play is performed in one act, without intermission. For ticket prices and showtimes, see www.althertheater.org or call 454-2787.