Digging up one's roots can be a traumatic experience. There's often that stubborn taproot that won't release its hold on hidden history but nevertheless shapes the development of new growth. Stacie Chaiken, in her solo show, attempts to deal with the ornery root that has dominated her childhood and young adult life: her great grandfather, Louie, about whom none of her family will speak. Louie did something so terrible that even his name has been erased from the collective family memory. Motivated by her growing feeling of rootlessness, rejecting familial and religious conviction, Chaiken searches for self-realization. Only incidentally it becomes an oral history of her family as she attempts to dig out the deadly secret. 

 

A self-described second-generation Russian-Jewish American and a sometimes redhead, Chaiken lays out her story in hugely descriptive detail as she maps a lifeline through the tangled truths and half truths, denials and rejections, dealt out by her family. Her journey is an exquisitely painful and very personal excursion through the changes—of religion, lifestyle, habits, dress, and hair color—brought about by her feeling of disconnection from her past. The impression is not of the too-often boring self-obsession that overtakes so many solo pieces; rather it is of a revealing X-ray, in living color, seasoned by laughter and tears, of a young lifetime devoted to an absorbing search for truth.

 

Despite temporary asylum in an unsuitable marriage and panicked flight to the unequivocal dogma of Catholicism, the Talmud and its teachings figure strongly in Chaiken's groping for some sort of satisfactory truth. Whereas this could make the play very specific material, it manages, by virtue of Chaiken's open-faced honesty and the clarity of her telling, to be deeply felt, quite universal, and very moving.

 

Stephanie Shroyer directs Chaiken's performance with assuredness, but the performer herself is quite definitely directing her own life. Particularly fine is the performer's home video of her defining interview with her aging grandfather. Ian Walker provides some suitably low notes on bass as resonant punctuation for this appealingly externalized internal search.