[NoHo Arts District, CA] – A NoHo Arts theatre review of Jello Brain, written and performed by Natalie Grove, directed by Terra Mackintosh and produced by Jonah Weiland.
Jello Brain is a play about Alzheimer’s. Or, as Natalie Grove, the writer and star of this tragically unique play prefers to call it, dementia.
Jello Brain is Natalie and her mother’s story. Natalie’s mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s at 55. After some outpatient treatment, hospital stays and nursing home residency, she is now entering memory care. The dementia is progressing, but Natalie’s mother is still able to tell her she loves her and is still very capably using her wicked and very dry sense of humor to hilarious results. But Natalie is well aware that her mother is slowly disappearing. Each time she leaves, it breaks her, and each time she return,s she arrives to less and less of her mother.
All this and Natalie has just taken her own genetic test to see if she will eventually develop Alzheimer’s herself, and the doctor is desperately trying to get hold of her to give her the results…Natalie keeps declining the call.
This is complicated stuff. Caring for aging parents when we are in our 50s and they are in their 80s is something we will all have to get our heads around someday. But when you’re in your early 20s, as is Natalie, and you receive that terrible news that someone you love is fading away little by heartbreaking little and that there is nothing you can do to stop it. Well, most of us cannot ever know what that would be like, but Natalie does and she wrote this incredible show to try and explain it.
In Jello Brain, Natalie takes us with her as she travels to her mother’s care home to visit, as she tries to navigate her life as her mother’s carer. Natalie moved home when her mother got diagnosed. She dropped everything, her acting career, her life in L.A., everything that gave her life a center and a purpose was put on hold…indefinitely. She now has a new purpose and a new precious center, her mother.
Jello Brain is a stunningly sweet story told with love and humor by Natalie Grove, who is an incredibly gifted storyteller and so bound up in her story that she appears almost translucent. So deep is her need to tell her story that she tells it with an incredible blend of broad strokes and intimate details. And all with every character with subtle and sublime portrayals.
She shares every person in her life as she now knows them with gentleness, masterful observational skills and a delightful and preciously respectful candor. This solo play is a wonderfully weird masterpiece. A triumph in storytelling and not just because the stakes are so incredibly high. Using her utterly unique style of self-effacing energy Natalie literally vibrates her way through this wonderfully written and beautifully wrought play. All the while avoiding what may be her own scientific blow of brutal reality.
Natalie Grove is an absolute marvel. She navigates this terrible and genuinely terrifying reality with a sweetness and a continuing bravery that really defies description. Jello Brain is genuinely marvellous and heartbreaking and forces us to contemplate our own warped sense of impossible infinite being head on and with no misplaced veils of platitudes. Jello Brain is brutal in its objectivity. Beautiful in its ability to lift the veil while simultaneously framing this reality with a gentle grace. Because this is so real to Natalie, she is able to frame the inevitability of disappearing with love and light and many helpings of hilariousness.
Jello Brain is a must-see play of extraordinary honesty and beauty. I cannot recommend it more highly or with more genuine admiration. It is art made real and reality made into the best kind of art. Bravo!!!
Tickets:
https://events.thestagecrafts.com/projects/12371?tab=details
When:
Thursday, July 10, Friday, July 11, Friday, July 18, and Saturday, July 19.
All performances at 7pm
Where:
The Madnani Theater
6760 Lexington Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90038
The Team
NATALIE GROVE – Writer / Performer. JONAH WEILAND – Producer. TERRA MACKINTOSH – Director. ALSO (Drew Roger Conrad and Mark Zelen) – Sound designer. SANDRA KUKER-FRANCO, SANDRA KUKER PR – Publicist
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