Sara Cooper, who wrote the book and lyrics, and Zach Redler, who composed the music, met in the graduate musical theater writing program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts; this is their first musical. Their youth and relative inexperience sometimes shows — the structure of the show never clarifies how much time it encompasses, for example, and the mother, at 61, is a bit young for typical Alzheimer’s — and yet the emotional shadings of the relationship between mother and daughter are remarkably believable and complex.
The two characters — they’re identified only as Mother and Daughter — are both onstage for all 80 minutes of the intermissionless show, though the focus shifts from one to the other and then to the two of them together, then back again to a solo. Daughter, played with solidly grounded good humor and wry self-awareness by Leslie Kritzer, has moved back into her mother’s Brighton Beach apartment after the Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Mother, in Catherine Cox’s wonderfully layered and slowly unraveling portrayal, starts in denial of her condition and only intermittently seems to grasp the reality of it — another trait that strikes a familiar chord for those touched by the disease.
One element that removes any trace of treacle from the story is Mother’s strikingly difficult personality — and, even more, the late revelation of the family secret that rewrites both Daughter’s and our understanding of that prickliness. We sense instantly that this woman was never easy to live with, and that the disease won’t make her any easier. By the end, though, both we and her child feel more compassion, and more understanding, than we ever would have expected at the outset.
