A Reckoning

Memories are slippery things to stage. Used sparingly, the words "I remember" can be an effective way of making sense of a character's current frame of mind, but they do little to propel the action of a play. Despite its clever dialogue and quirky characters, Paula Vogel's Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive, for instance, so strongly relies on the central character's recollection of the past that the work rarely moves out of first gear. Wesley Moore's A Reckoning suffers from a similar problem. Like Drive, A Reckoning examines how childhood memories impact the present-day lives of -- and the troubled relationship between -- a young woman and an older male relative. In Moore's play, the man in question is the woman's father, a widowed, professionally successful San Francisco architect; in Vogel's, it's an uncle. Though tightly written by Moore, subtly acted by real-life father and daughter Kevin Tighe and Jennifer Tighe, rhythmically directed by Richard Seyd, and intelligently designed by John Iacovelli, A Reckoning spends so much time revealing the characters' flimsy memories that the present -- the dimension in which the drama actually unfolds -- lacks substance.