dementia

John Grady is a consummate performer with dance, film and stage experience and awards. His show, The Old Woman, certainly exhibits his brilliance as a performer.  Grady explores the responsibility of providing care for his 87-year-old mother who suffers dementia, seizures and severe bone and joint pain and has been put in an uninspiring care home. While going through the humorous and harrowing interaction with his mother he also faces his own fear that he too, despite his agility, is losing his ability to remember. Terrifying? You bet, but Grady is too wise to drown us in misery; he...

Amelia Van Brunt of Bad, Bad Bunny company from San Francisco gives the audience a laugh out loud romp through the troubles of old age while still delivering a hint of the pain and frustration of aging.  Her character, Mona Whittaker, lives alone in a leaky apartment, her husband deceased and her children absent. Her best ally and comfort is her plush Lazy Boy rocker that serves as her nap nest, catapult, and boat as she imagines the leak becoming a flood. Mona’s other joys are tea and the newspaper obituaries (do come to the show to see why)....