Simon Catillon, Tracy Weller, Ariel Lauryn, Amanda Card, Andrew Murdock, Takemi Kitamura in Small Acts of Daring Invention. Photo: Maria Baranova

A melancholy, nearly wordless fantasia on themes of memory and loss, Small Acts of Daring Invention is visually striking with a real sense of theatrical wonder– but it’s also one of those pieces of theater that I understand much better from having access to its script and its press materials than I did when I was in the room with it. In the room, it can feel scatty and improvisational; the script makes it clear that it’s as choreographed as an ensemble ballet, with each of its talismanic objects and pieces of stage magic carefully woven into a portrait of a woman trying to relocate her sense of self. The down-on-her-luck Woman, never named, dressed in a dingy raincoat and an old lady’s folding rain bonnet (later replaced by a wig equally of another era), sneaks into the space. She creeps past the windows outside, casting her shadow on them, before entering what at first seems like a cluttered attic or storage warehouse and gradually reveals itself to be an abandoned library–perhaps the children’s room, based on its miniature table and chairs. As she starts to remove shrouds of dust cloth from the room’s furniture (a granny-style shopping cart, an old card catalog, giant bookshelves), she also discovers objects that trigger reactions: memories perhaps? She doesn’t speak in words, only chirps and hmms, so we don’t get access to what she’s thinking, but we can see that some of the objects provoke much greater reactions than others. An antique manual typewriter, an old camera–these cause a moment’s pause, a faint glimmer of recognition, but no emotion. 

The objects that do trigger emotion–a beat-up doll and two equally dilapidated stuffed bears–are the central characters of a children’s book series that ran from the late 1950s through the 1980s: the Lonely Doll books, which were illustrated with photographs that the author, Dare Wright, took of her doll Edith and two stuffed bears. The books–which I remember, not entirely pleasantly, from my own childhood, are distinctly creepy; Edith the doll somehow seems trapped in many of the black-and-white photos. I don’t know if I would have recognized the source if I hadn’t come in primed for it, but I also don’t know how much it matters–the vague uncanny familiarity of the doll and the general sense of comfort that comes from teddy bears get the message across. These talismans of childhood, which emerge, crumpled and in pieces, from a shopping cart, become the things that can draw the Woman back into her past. The Woman might be seen as a late-in-life Dare Wright, estranged from her own mind as well as her earlier successes, but equally as any other lost soul, looking to relight a spark of memory  and reconnect to her past.

She is a person buffeted by life: we glimpse her first as shadows on the stage right window panes, then she creeps into the dim library begins to explore. Each new discovery sends her in a fleeting direction–a bag of cat food, which becomes briefly a stand-in for a cat; a small purse; a little teapot that mysteriously contains olives–with a peep or moan. The space itself seems to be trying to trick her: Papers hover above the ground, forming a sort of tree and shifting positions when she looks away. A cascade of buttons descends from the sky–buttons magically matching her coat. And, in one of the piece’s cleverest coups de theatre, a cadre of five puppeteers, dressed in canvas smocks that resemble the dust cloths, emerge from the space’s nooks and crannies, unfolding one at a time from spaces that don’t seem big enough to have hidden people.

The script calls the puppeteers the “Shepherds of Memory,” and it’s a perfect description. Through manipulating the doll, bears, and occasionally other objects (Simple Mischief Studio gets the puppetry credit), they cajole, coax, and gently guide the Woman into her own mind and her own past. Sometimes she becomes the puppet and they manipulate her, with a compassionate gentleness. Sometimes her memories seem to be  illustrated by projections that have the same tantalizing familiarity as the doll. Projected onto the furniture and dust sheets, the images can be distorted by wrinkles in the cloth, or only seen in part because of the angle of projection. Like her memories, they are elliptical and partial, rather than narrative or explanatory.

Director Kristjan Thor and an exceptional design team expertly build a mood that hovers between children’s book, ghost story,  and horror film, drawing on visual and audio tropes of all three genres. Christopher and Justin Swader’s set and Patricia Marjorie’s props set us roughly in a mid-twentieth-century time frame–or perhaps just what we think we remember of that era from seeing it in black-and-white movies. The play obviously is not in black-and-white, but it almost feels like it is, with whites, creams, grays, and shadows everywhere. We feel the dust that hangs heavy over the environment. Only pops of pink remind us of the world of color. Daisy Long’s hazy, angled lighting helps to hide the puppeteers before their emergence and to create shadows that move in eerie ways; Phil Carluzzo’s sound design and music add another note of melancholy with just a touch of the eerie. 

It’s a gorgeous presentation, rich in detail and stage magic without ever being showy or calling attention to its tricks. At the same time, the space and its objects seem to hold more resonance than the human character at the play’s heart. The action, such as it is, takes place inside the Woman’s mind, on a path we can’t quite follow, one that ultimately seems to spiral itself back to where it began. Perhaps the Woman achieves some peace, some transcendence along the way. I felt like I’d bathed in the play-world’s ambiance for 90 minutes, but stepped out with only a vague sense of unease. There are some powerful undercurrents floating through Small Acts of Daring Invention, but a little too subtextually, and a little too ephemerally.