"The Maria Project" at 59E59
“The Maria Project” at 59E59 Theaters
Developed, Written, and Performed by Marcella Goheen
Directed by Larry Moss
Marcella Goheen’s “The Maria Project” is ultimately about consciousness and the journey one needs to take to achieve restorative consciousness. Currently running at 59E59 in Manhattan, “The Maria Project” ostensibly follows Goheen’s extended search to understand the secret her mother shared with her when Ms. Goheen was seven: to honor her grandmother Maria’s legacy and memory. In fact, the project is a brilliant extended metaphor for “the talking cure” gifted to the world by Sigmund Freud. Although Freud has fallen into disfavor in most contemporary systems of psychotherapy, his insistence on bringing to consciousness all those repressed memories which have the power (if we allow them to) to create systemic dysfunction in individual underpins all successful psychotherapeutic endeavors.
Perhaps more instructive in all quests for consciousness, including that of Marcella Goheen, is the work of Freud’s daughter Anna “About Losing and Being Lost” wherein she explores the 'simultaneous urges to remain loyal to the dead and to turn towards new ties with the living' (quoted in Lisa Appignanesi & John Forrester, Freud's Women (London 2005) p. 302). It is Goheen’s quest to honor the secret of her grandmother and her reunion with her uncle Frank that gives “The Maria Project” its impressive and sustained importance.
The determined, obsessive, search for one thing – in this case, the meaning of Maria’s secret – leads the committed trailblazer to yet another search, then to another, and to yet another. Marcella Goheen’s passion to find and honor the “lost” (cf. Anna Freud above) secret of her grandmother Maria is the playwright’s invitation for the audience member to initiate his or her own quest, to assemble our own life “footage,” to confront and interpret our own pain and sorrow until we, as she has done, discover the mother lode (for Marcella it was Uncle Frank) that focuses our own quest: focuses on our questions that will, most likely, send us on to continue our own quests for consciousness, for our Maria. This quest will ultimately give us peace. Or not.
Marcella Goheen’s narrative is sometimes interrupted by director Larry Moss’s somewhat frenetic direction. Movement in this important piece of storytelling is internal not external. It is Marcella’s diction, her syntax, her pathos that drives the piece to success, not her constant crisscrossing movement across the stage. Ms. Goheen needs a stool and a place to kneel, nothing more.
Finally, Marcella, it might be time for “The Uncle Frank Project.” He, too, is “missing” in that formidable 1400 page manuscript. And you, after all, are his favorite niece (well, the only niece he knows. Remember his letter: “Marcella, leave your mother alone. She’s had a hard life. Remember – you are less than you think you are and more than you are. I’ll see ya. Your Uncle Frank.”
THE MARIA PROJECT
Developed, written, and performed by Marcella Goheen. Presented by Pure Products, Inc. and Uncle Frank Productions. Directed by Larry Moss. Technical direction by Perchik Kreiman-Miller. Production Stage Manager, Megan E. Coutts. The performance schedule is Tuesday – Thursday at 7:15 PM; Friday at 8:15 PM; Saturday at 8:15 PM; and Sunday at 3:15 PM and 7:15 PM through Sunday, April 1. Performances are at 59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues). Tickets are $35 ($24.50 for 59E59 Members). To purchase tickets, call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 or go to www.59e59.org.
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 | Permalink | Posted by David Roberts on Sunday, March 11, 2012 |
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