Two Cents: Forget Me, Please (Sydney Fringe)
They meet in the emergency ward, two twenty-somethings with a concussion. Through goofily thick speech, giggling like they’re high on nangs, Andi and Sasha get to know each other a little, get cute with each other a little, too. Here they create their first secret code: “cup, keys, bird”. It’s a random mantra they’re supposed to remember to get the nurse’s all clear to go home. “Cup, keys, sunflower,” Sasha says, grins at Andi, and stays.
With two striking and natural performances in Kala Gare and Shannen Alyce Quan, Forget Me, Please is a meditation on what each individual person can stand to remember and forget. With a clear sci-fi lineage in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, this play by Sophie Davis unfolds as a tragic love story that just happens to be queer. Subverting the shallow bromide “love heals all”, it explores ideas of trauma and its shadows, time and memory, the many forms of betrayal, and the ‘rights’ a person has to access a loved one’s inner life, the light and the dark. In such claims can reside unknown harms.
Like a spliced memory or a cut-up tape, we move back and forth in time, slowly pushing forward, piecing things together. A white modular set becomes a house, a hospital, a rooftop. Although Andi (Quan) is hesitant, Sasha (Gare) – a person of big gestures, vibrant, romantic, feckless and sweet – at last convinces her they’re destined. So, these best friends of several years, sweet oddballs the pair of them, become partners.
For Sasha, ‘girlfriend’ is a higher order category than ‘friend’. There's no overlap, with a vastly different set of responsibilities and entitlements attached. For Andi, you can’t be a partner without being a friend. Their back and forth on this is more than semantics, and while it plays out like a lovers’ gentle tiff, it's full of sombre foreboding.
Under Jessica DiCosta’s direction, Gare and Quan do brilliant work bringing their characters to life, handling their vulnerabilities tenderly, and blazing their strengths. With so much going on beneath the surface, their microexpressions and subtle shifts in body language are engrossing.
It’s an enormous act of risk and/or faith to give one’s full self to another; to ask that they hold us, messy and spiky and raw. For Andi, who on her bad days feels the horrors of her past abuse like the eternal present, emotional intimacy is far more fraught. When Sasha pushes her to open up, it feels like she’s gouging at the self Andi hides away to keep safe.
Occasionally the play gives us a window into Andi’s psyche, a wall of unendurable noise that drowns everything else out. “Your brain got better, mine didn't,” she says.
It’s not fair on either of them, but neither is their fault. Their mutual fear of abandonment is what drives them towards the cliff.
Forget Me is a kind of heart-hurting horror story, where the monster scene came long ago, but can be felt in every moment since. This one you won’t forget.
Forget Me Please
By Sophie Davis
The Old Fitz, Sydney
