MCT's "Mala" is an Emotional Evening Full of Love and Loss
Photo by Paul Ruffolo.
I am very glad that I was not there when my grandmother passed away, in her mid-nineties after losing her identity to a decade of Alzheimer’s disease. I never had to reconcile the quietly determined, incredibly kind and resilient, lived-through-the-Depression, joyfully practical woman with the tiny, abusive, and petulant patient she was at the end, as my aunt cared for her. Separated by several states, I had the luxury of keeping my memories intact and letting my relatives deal with her very long – disorienting and disoriented – decline.
In other words, I was much luckier than Mala, the main character in Melinda Lopez’s one-person play of the same name, playing at Milwaukee Chamber Theatre through February 13. Portrayed with a surprising amount of humor, consistent pleas for grace, and disarming honesty by Milwaukee favorite Rána Roman, Mala is a jumble of extremes: hot and cold, child and parent, good and bad, certainty and doubt, sick and well, right and wrong, old and young, and life and death. It is also a beautiful collection of experiences, prayers, and unflinching revelations about what it to take care of your parents at the end of their lives.
Written by award-winning Latina playwright Melinda Lopez, Mala is filled with carefully curated, autobiographical specifics that make the play intensely human and ultimately universal. Lopez locates the story in New England during a particularly cold, snowy, bleak winter when she was recovering from the death of her father and within a year, ushering her mother from this life to the next. As writers do, Lopez used writing to help navigate the frustrating and painful time, which she also illustrates in the play: She makes notes on her iPhone in the tiny moments she gets to herself, between monitoring her mother’s mental and physical health; weighing her mother’s wishes against medical advice from a barrage of doctors, EMTs, hospice nurses, and even friends; being an imperfect mother to a young daughter; and being the “good cop” when her older sister the scientist occasionally drops in on the situation.
Roman brings Mala to life with ease, along with dozens of other characters, employing gestures, changes in accent, and specific facial expressions. Each person is distinct and fully realized so that watching the actress go back and forth between a large cast of characters is not confusing, it’s astonishing. Her warmest self is the one we meet at the top of the show, dressed casually in a sweatshirt, holding a mug of tea, her long brown hair falling easily around her shoulders and down her back. She reassures us that if we are caregivers, if we are worried about someone we left at home, then we don’t have to turn off our cell phones. It’s okay to listen for a call. Speaking directly to us – and interacting genuinely with us – it’s as if she is welcoming the audience to a grief support group. But as the story unfolds, we realize that there is a maelstrom of panic, worry, regret, self-recrimination, exhaustion, anger, resentment, and sorrow swelling underneath her placid, calm surface. And perhaps this monologue, along with some mindful breathing and recitations of good things, is Mala’s own form of much needed therapy.
As our guide through the story, Mala begins by describing the events around her mother’s declining health in chronological order. But soon she gets distracted. Her brain makes connections to other stories she wants to share that often speak more broadly of family and friends who have other experiences around the loss of a loved one. Some are funny in the abstract. Some are enviable in their peacefulness. Some are made of the stupid things people say when they talk about death. And many are multilayered – as she reflects on her childhood with an impatient, sometimes angry mother, she worries about parenting her daughter – seeing herself reflected in both the past and the future, responsible suddenly for the wellbeing of two equally needy people who define her.
As Mala moves from story to story, each section is labeled with supertitles, projected on layers of sheer white fabric that drape elegantly across the stage from foreground to background. Any lines in Spanish are also translated into English and projected there, although it’s pretty easy to get the gist of Mami’s curses from Roman’s full body inflections. While Mala roams around the stage draped in white, Lisa Schlenker’s blank, billowy scenic design easily morphs from a warm living room, to a suffocating long-term care facility, to a blinding blizzard, to a sobering daydream on an ice flow in the Arctic. Director Brent Hazelton moves Mala around the stage with intention and keeps the pacing steady, while allowing for a few moments of quiet while we all reflect on the impossible, painful situation that we will all be part of someday.
Mid-way through the one-person play, Mala confesses that she resents the fact that her mother and father have not taught her what to do in this situation – parenting her parents – but then quietly asks, “how could they?” She admits that as every person’s journey towards death is unique, the right path to guide them down is often baffling. “Nobody teaches you how to stay married, or raise a grateful child, or help your parents through that difficult transition.” And when the hospice nurse says Mami has about three months left to live, the audience, like Mala, is unsure whether to be grateful for the time, relieved that it will come to an end, or disappointed that the suffering will go on so long.
In her final scene, Mala resolves to turn towards the light, represented by a bowl of clementines that she has been fantasizing about. Watching Roman cradle the clementines in her lap, then separate the vibrant orange peel from the fruit sections is meditative and hopeful. In a play almost devoid of props and painted with only the faintest colors, she is finally getting to the heart of the bright orange fruit, and taking it in.
There is certainly no such thing as a perfect mom or daughter. And there might not be a “capital G Good, capital D, Death,” but Mala has resolved to keep trying. Right now, in the midst of a snowy cold winter, where we all feel the weight of simply getting through the next three months, that message of resilience is welcome on many levels.