A View from House Seats
By Shirley Lorraine

The Elite Theatre in Oxnard has tackled some sensitive subjects in the past. On stage now is perhaps the most touchy of all – suicide and depression. Not a topic easily offered, nor one to be taken lightly. In the Tony-award and Pulitzer-prize winning drama, ‘night, Mother, the Elite stages a powerful work that is heart-rending, introspective and served with just enough moments of humor to keep the audience absorbed.

Directed by Brian Robert Harris, the two-person cast delivers with force. Thelma Cates (Kimberly Demmary) is a middle-class, middle-aged widow who has settled into a functional existence purposly devoid of excitement and change. Her daughter Jessie (Emily Asher Kellis) now lives with her mother following upsets in her own life. She suffers from severe depression and now has decided that enough is enough. She plans to kill herself tonight. The act is no longer debatable.

What follows is n uninterrupted exchange between mother and daughter in which understanding is attempted without much success. Jessie does her best to prepare her mother for her absence, while mother is actively denying acceptance of the situation.

Depression is an incidious malady. It can creep up on you, build slowly or attack maliciously. For Jessie, the build-up has been constant, with years and layers of missteps, misunderstandings and misinformation. The burden is now too great to endure. Still, she feels it is critical that her mother gain a glimmer of understanding and takes great pains to prepare her for the inevitable.

Demmary gives a solid, masterful performance of a woman filled with pain, denial and hope. While the character does have a grasp of her daughter’s despair, she also cannot imagine life without her and simply refuses to do so. She herself is no picture of mental health and fights to maintain what little equilibrium she has.

Emily Asher Kellis is an enigma in the role of the emotionally tortured daughter. She is at times bouncy, smiling and patient, and at other times angry, discouraged and pragmatic. She obsessively makes lists, rearranges items in the cupboard, and futilely attempts to give her mother one last touching gift that is repeatedly rejected– a manicure. She loves her mother and knows her action will cause great pain. At the same time, her mind is simply ready to blow. She is on overload.

While it is true that in most cases, those who intend to commit suicide do so without fanfare and lengthy discussion, the play’s content analyzes the thought processes in both mother and daughter, giving the audience insights into how the situation came to this point. Even though the end is announced early on, when it does take place, the reality still hits like a hammer.
A Pultizer play powerfully portrayed.

‘night, Mother continues through May 22. Performances are Friday and Satursday at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m. Ont Thursday performance closing weekend. Covid cautions still in place. (805) 483-5118, www.theElite.org

Streaming Spotlight by Cindy Summers
Undone (Seasons 1 & 2) – Amazon Originals

In Undone, Alma Winograd (Rosa Salazar) was bored with the repeating patterns of her everyday life as a preschool teacher in a comfortable relationship with her boyfriend who was obviously more committed to a future life together. Her sister Becca (Angelique Cabral) was soon to be married, and while hanging out at a bar they had a fight and Alma left crying. Strangely, as she was driving home she saw her father Jacob (Bob Odenkirk), who had passed away, standing on the corner which caused a serious car accident that had her in a coma for two weeks.

Alma woke and saw her dad Jacob in the room, though no one else could see him. Jacob told Alma he caused the accident to trigger her special abilities and help solve issues around his death. Jacob was persistent, and Alma eventually became aware through her father’s help that she had the ability to time travel. Her new found abilities became disruptive to her everyday life, finding herself frequently popping back and forth in time. Alma, like her grandmother, had been diagnosed with schizophrenia but Jacob believed many like this mom and daughter actually had special gifts to bend the rules of space and time.

At the end of Season 1, Alma travels back to the night her father died to try to change the past only to discover her father’s actions were intentional and that her mother was at her father’s lab that night though she had always denied it. Unfortunately in real time, Alma ran into a mirror on the wall at the preschool she worked at in front of all the children and was kindly let go from her job. This compelled Alma to go to Mexico to connect with her dad, but her boyfriend Sam called her mom Camila thinking her actions were due to her not taking her schizophrenia meds.

Becca went to Mexico to find Alma, sharing she had told Reed on their honeymoon about her indiscretion and that his family was moving to annul the marriage. Alma was convinced her dad would emerge from the cave and that Becca would be fine because their timeline would be adjusted. They stayed all night and as the sun rose in Season 2, Alma went into the cave after Becca went back to the car hoping that she had changed time and would find her father.

When Alma emerged from the cave, Becca was gone and when calling her learned she was on her honeymoon with Reed in Bora Bora and that her father was alive. Alma could also now play the piano and speak Spanish in her new timeline, but there was no Sam or preschool from the past. Jacob said his abilities were more limited now that he was in a physical body again, and shared that his wife had concerns about him being schizophrenic so he had to stop his previous research though help counsel Alma with her time travel abilities.

Season 2 also reveals that Becca has special abilities as well allowing her to move through time into memories, and also discovered she could bring others with her. Her grandmother Geraldine (Holley Fain), who was in a mental care facility, also had similar abilities and they seemed to be inherited genetically. Alma and Becca realized that they could repair issues that they found in the past and teamed up to find family secrets that had damaging results in their futures.

Undone uses rotoscoping animation where animators trace over real images of actors, which creates a show that looks like a hybrid of animation and live action that feels both realistic and contrived. The animators did line drawings of each of the characters frame by frame, then the footage went to their studio in Amsterdam and those performances were hand-painted onto oil-painting backgrounds. Each episode contains 150-200 oil paintings that provide backdrops.

Seasons 1&2: 8 episodes – 25min