Reading shares experiences of those caring for sick loved ones
A group of people face an audience and we hear lines from a play: “I didn’t choose this. We were supposed to grow old together. Instead, he grew younger. I have to do everything for her. This is my mother. My father. My wife. My husband. My sister. My friend.”
The reading is a 35-minute compilation of experiences from people who have been there. Doug Hill’s script, “Caregiver Collage” recounts some of the very particular incidents that often crop up when a loved one becomes totally dependent. It deals with the overwhelming rushes of responsibility, loss, anger, fear and love.
As you’d expect, it’s a moving piece, but it provides no easy answers. It looks at the situation in a realistic way and offers some realistic advice. It’s easy to sit there hearing the words and thinking, “That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling lately. I didn’t think anyone else understood.”
A reading of the play is being held at 1 p.m. June 29 (no admission charge), when the UNLV Senior Theatre Program performs at the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health, 888 W. Bonneville Ave. There’ll be a discussion afterward, and a tour of the newly opened facility.
Hill is the head of the troupe. His script was performed in January at Reno’s Ageless Repertory Theatre. His actors are mostly older folks who take their hobby of acting pretty seriously. They’ve done some effective shows at the Paul Harris Theatre.
In a previous column, UNLV theater department chair Brackley Frayer talked about the case of the mysteriously missing light board. The Black Box theater had been locked at night following a performance, and at 9 a.m. the next morning a $30,000 light board was gone. Amazingly, UNLV got it back. “It was on eBay,” Frayer said, “and the person who listed it had read our students’ blogs about the theft and contacted me. I turned it over to the police and they were able to recover the board. The person who stole the board pawned it at a local shop. The eBay person then bought it from the pawnshop and listed it. I’m still hopeful they’ll be able to catch the thieves.”
Las Vegas Little Theatre’s Fringe Festival, which closed Sunday, appears to have been a financial success (according to board President Walter Niejadlik) and certainly a critical one. The program presented 10 hourlong plays in two weekends. For theater lovers, it was a sabbatical picnic. I can’t remember so many different kinds of local performers (serious actors, comic, movement specialists, monologists) wowing so many people under one roof.
Two of the scripts — Ernie Curcio’s Unfinished,” about a man’s strange relationship to a painting, and Ross Howard’s “Arthur and Esther,” about a disturbed librarian considering a catastrophic action — will get an encore at 8 p.m. today and Saturday. Here’s hoping for more in the future. Log onto lvlt.org for more information.
Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas NV 89125.
