The Play
The TimeSlips Project produced two plays based on the whimsical characters that emerged in our storytelling workshops by people with dementia. The professionally produced play is part of our ongoing outreach efforts, which share the creative promise of people with ADRD.
Interested in producing your own play? TimeSlips staff is available for consultation to help you create your own outreach plan. Email us at the Respond page for more information. The TimeSlips Educational Guide that accompanied our own play productions is available for free here.
Interested in producing the TimeSlips play? Our 80-minute play can be done as “reader’s theater” or a full production. It follows the journey of the storytellers with dementia as they invent and inhabit colorful characters and help each other to complete their tales.
A can-can dancer conceals the long legs of ostrich beneath her skirts, a singing cowboy serenades his devoted horse with song, a determined swimmer battles the Hudson to break a world record, and a bookworm struggles to liberate himself from a mountain of books. Through the storytelling process, these fragmented personalities band together to help each other complete their journeys even as memory fails their authors.
Created for an ensemble of older performers, this six-person play captures the humor and poignancy of life lived outside the conventional boundaries of time. TimeSlips champions the power of the imagination to transform lives and challenges us to wonder, "Are we more than memory?"
Contact us if you would like to read the script.
Reviews
Village Voice
Francine Russo 11/9/2001 The lady in Victorian satins lifts her red petticoats to a cancan beat as a leather-fringed cowboy-cum-guitar player struts by serenading his horse - a voluptuous woman in equine costume. Meanwhile, in the rear window - puppet show-style - a champion swimmer lifts her arms over blue cloth waves, and a Dickensian bookseller in top hat and tails struggles to balance his stacks of tomes. Welcome to the behind-the-looking-glass world that flourishes in the minds of Alzheimer's patients. A dazzling piece of stagecraft, Anne Basting's TimeSlips (Here) delights even as it casts poignant, terrifying shadows.
Based on Basting's storytelling workshops with dementia victims, the play begins with five patients in various stages of the disease - some vacant, some wisecracking, all anxious - in session with a nurse. They cannot answer questions like "Who can tell me where we are?" But when she shows them a photo, they shout out disassociated bits that fuse into a tale.
"My mother always warned me about cowboys," giggles Marie, who in the play's fantasy main section becomes Rex's lascivious horse. As they unfold, the patients' stories blur and merge. Each repeats variations on set routines - the dancer slyly confides Parisian rumors that she has ostrich legs; the cowboy and his amore banter suggestively on the way to the barn. As in dreams, the events make no sense, but the emotions behind them do - loss and fear and longing.
As their disease progresses, the group's circular rituals - desperate strategies to maintain control - fragment. The cowboy endlessly repeats the first few words of his tune, unable to remember the rest as his frustrated lover presses on with their seduction ritual, leaving silent spaces for his responses. Finally, she flings her arms about him and sobs.
A remarkable ensemble makes this heartbreak - and much else - visceral. Under Christopher Bayes's inspired direction, the stage constantly sizzles with color, music, and motion, the work of an inventive design team (David Korins, Christianne Myers, and Diane D. Fairchild). At one moment these bizarre creatures may be waltzing together to "Bicycle Built for Two," at another, circling like mechanical figures to music-box chimes. Korin's chameleon set brilliantly embodies the play's themes. Its hinged, translucent walls allow rooms to change shape; its cartoon-like window backdrops shimmy down, slide by or collide. Characters are just as likely to clamber through a skyscraper window as sail through a door. It's a world where you cannot get hold on reality's slippery shapes. You should see TimeSlips not because it will teach you about the survival of dementia patient's core selves - though it will - but because it is a spellbinding work of imagination.
Nytheatre.com
11/13/2001 (abridged) Anne Basting's new play TimeSlips offers an affecting glimpse into the lives and minds of people with Alzheimer's. In it, a nurse-facilitator named Polly works with five individuals at an adult day center, urging and abetting their communication by encouraging them to invent stories about people she shows them in pictures. Invent they do, gradually and fitfully at first then in fertile outpourings of imagery and imagination that dazzle and delight. The stories can careen and misfire and stop and restart as their tellers grapple with the dysfunction that has taken over their minds. As a result, TimeSlips is dizzily absurdist and surreal on its surface, but profoundly sad in its subtext.
The play offers outstanding opportunities to its cast of six, all of whom do superb work here. Two musicians, Christopher Curtis and Aaron Halva, provide invaluable and lovely accompaniment. A thrillingly ingenious set design by David Korins further enhances the piece. (reviewed on November 1st, 2001)
Showbusinessweekly.com
Desiree Burch (abridged) Fetal is the space created at HERE Arts Center by the world of Anne Basting's TimeSlips - embryonic. There is a womb-like comfort reminiscent of the first few days of swirling color while you lay in a crib. This piece is the rotating mobile, gracefully exchanging one image for another without the traditional human trapping of needing to "make a story."
TimeSlips evolves from the harsh chaos of the reality of Alzheimer's patients to a created world that has much more elegant aspect of control and continuity. David Korins' beautiful set moves in and out of place like a thick fog from which beauty emerges. The initial, seemingly random assortment of items place on the stage moves in and out of focus with a harmony that breaks the bondage of staccato reality into a rhythmic paradise. It is a magical to watch how this movement and rhythm seeps into the bodies of the performers, as they too transition between parts of the symphony with which John Frieman's character, Bookman, frustrates himself.
The product of this generous gift of creation is effectively subliminal. The manner in which it conjures the dreams and essence of the creative entities it presents us with déjà vu-like images bearing matter that breaks down long before substance. Just when you think that a character you trust it talking gibberish, they snap you back with a picture so clear that you must questions that reality which obscures them. Thus the ultimate goal of the piece is attained: to escape the necessity for time and tangible sense and get back to the being of humanity.
