'The Other Place,' Now at Dobama Theatre, is a Powerful Story of Aging, Memory and Identity

There are few more terrifying outcomes of life than losing one's mind and memory. As humans grow older, we are ultimately a stack of memories that define who we are and where we fit in the world and in our families. But when those memories and the mental skills that attend them distort and disappear, we are left in a barren, hostile land without a GPS.

In The Other Place now at Dobama Theatre, playwright Sharr White invites you to take such a journey. And thanks to a talented cast led by Tracee Patterson in the lead role, the intentionally confusing and disconcerting script slowly resolves into a shattering portrait of a whip-smart woman who must accept a new reality.

As the 50-ish Julianna, Patterson grabs hold of the audience as she speaks to us from the stage of a luxe hotel in the Virgin Islands. She is there in her role as a promoter for a new medication, Identamyl, which she claims can lessen the effects of dementia. But she is more than a big-pharma huckster, since we learn she had a previous career as a renowned neuroscientist.

Her presentation, studded with exotic medical terminology and snarky asides that amuse her listeners, soon is interrupted by Julianna's observations. For one, she sees a girl in a yellow string bikini sitting in rapt attention, and Julianna tries to suss out whether she wandered into the conference by mistake. She even directs a couple verbal jabs at her, but then "wallows in regret" at having done that.

From that point on the 90-minute play, directed with sharply-sculpted beats by Nathan Motta, allows us to follow the trajectory of Julianna's fevered mind as it swerves through scenes involving her husband Ian and several others including her daughter.

Along the way we get snatches of Julianna's backstory. How Laurel ran away when she was 15, how she married Julianna's former researcher Richard who now have two little girls, how Ian wants a divorce. The details accumulate, but we slowly catch on that Julianna is not a reliable narrator, and that her perception of the world she once managed with precise skill is now skewed in ways neither she nor the audience can clearly identify.

This is a bold task that the playwright sets for herself, and it calls on the audience to ride the waves of uncertainty until most of the elements come into focus later. That's when the scene shifts to their beach house, the "other place" Julianna rhapsodizes about from time to time.

This production rides on the shoulders of Patterson, and she is magnificent as her Julianna slaloms through mental moguls like an Olympic skier who has lost track of the course. Sutherland is also excellent in the less demanding role of Ian, feeling the pain as he tries to support his wife. The other female roles are handled smoothly by Mary Werntz, as are other male roles by Prophet Seay.

The only slight wrinkle in this engrossing play is a concluding moment where White opts for a rather simplistic dialogue scene between Julianna and another woman. Compared to what has gone before, it seems a bit pat and not up to the playwright's own exacting standard.

The Other Place is a play about regret, yes, but more than that it is a tribute to the human spirit that fights valiantly for a life being stolen by her slowly disintegrating mind. Patterson lands the show powerfully as she finally acknowledges that, "Not being myself is who I am—a woman in between this place and the other." A place we all will visit, eventually, one way or another.

The Other Place
Through April 2 at Dobama Theatre, 2340 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights, 216-932-3396, dobama.org.