Lana Schwarcz, the writer and solo live performer of Grandpa Sol and Lily’s Grandma Rosie (One Woman’s Adventures in Aged Care) has created a fascinating, endearing, funny, performance about the experiences of people in a Home for the Aged. This was an experimental show, using a script that had been created from recordings of live testimony of residents at the Emmy Monash Home for the Aged. The experiment involved Lana speaking/performing the words verbatim as they were played into her ears via an Ipod. Lana took on accents and personalities for all the people she played and used life-sized puppets to represent them. Lana created an amusing plot to provide a framework for the stories which involved her own character Jackie, discovering she had a phobia of aging and the elderly in nurse training and was then convinced by her therapist to confront her fears by getting a job in a nursing home for the elderly. She cleverly interwove her funny nurse training episodes into her nursing home experiences where she was gradually won over by its engaging residents and their amazing, often hilarious tales.
Although listed in the Puppet section of the Fringe guide, it was not really about the Puppets, they served more of a perfunctory role, mouthing the words of the stories of the elderly people, which could easily have been done by Lana as a one woman show. The puppets sat around the stage in wheelchairs and provided a rather spooky atmosphere to the home, which was where I found the main problem. The writer Lana wanted to convey the home as being brimming with warm life, but when the puppets were sitting there not being worked (in a dead state), because she could only work one or two at a time, they were a bit too creepily like horror images, zombies, stroke victims or even dead people. I’m thinking she hoped they looked like they were dozing or watching TV. Perhaps the puppets just needed a bit of work on their construction to keep the heads up. They looked great otherwise and Lana always treated them as if they were real residents she was caring for.
It was an enjoyable and moving show with a lot of rich European and Jewish humour and Lana portrayed all the characters beautifully. If you hadn’t read the programme, you might think she was using the Ipod naughtily as a prompt, but once you were used to her popping her earpiece in and out as the different characters spoke, it was a fun experience to know that she was replicating what real people had spoken; stutters, pauses, stumbles and all. Experiments are what Fringe is all about and this is a lovely one, so I recommend to head along to The Raglan and check it out.
For booking details go to the Fringe website