Theater of Life

It’s maddening, that feeling, much like a turn through a family album where most of the photos have worked themselves free from the page.

What remains? Vacant snapshot-sized windows where the photo once lay. A dogeared confusion bereft of chronology. A sepia wash: Moments so drained of detail, the remnants of image hover like ghosts.

These, too, are the tricks of fickle memory.

Sylvia Carlson can attest to that; her own memory a jumble of gaps, details fading, easing out of a slow tap, little by little, year after year.

To look at her in this moment, any distress would be difficult to discern. Carlson concentrates, bright eyes trained forward, intent on the words of Christian Lebano, a tall, wiry, starched-and-pressed actor / playwright who dramatically reanimates a collection of images that collectively make up her history.

As if attending a twilight screening, Carlson, 84, has draped herself elegantly across an easy chair. In black slacks and matching black turtleneck, she rests her head against an open palm, striking a starlet pose.

The open spaces begin to fill. She chuckles at her words. With hands over her face, eyes wide, she shrugs in disbelief at the inventory of accomplishments--misplaced, not forgotten.

Carlson has traveled a great distance--emotional, physical, political--to get here, Sunset Hall, a residential home for seniors sandwiched between single and multiple family dwellings in the busily transfiguring neighborhood of Koreatown.

“My memory,” says Lebano voicing Carlson, “has been taken because of strokes. It’s very frustrating. But it’s no good to sit around worrying about things you lost.”

Carlson nods, remembering those words, now embracing what is found: a priceless gift.

*

Lifestages, a program sponsored by the San Diego-based Playwrights Project, pairs young writers and actors with elderly storytellers who share a range of secrets, struggles, yearnings and cherished joys.

These interviews, in turn, are fashioned into dramatic, short monologues presented to their respective convalescent communities and, later, if funding allows, beyond those remote walls.

For many of the storytellers, it is a way to reevaluate their accomplishments, understand why they have buried pieces of their history, come to terms with what they perceive as failings or disappointment, or comprehend the scope of their accomplishments.

By giving back a past, says Playwright Project founder Deborah Salzer, “It validates a life.”

Since Playwrights Project became a nonprofit entity in 1989, Salzer’s primary focus has been drawing strong connections between theater and education for students. The idea for this phase of the project has roots in personal experience, when Salzer’s mother moved, in 1980, from New York to San Diego’s Kearney Mesa Convalescent Hospital.

“My mom . . . was failing,” Salzer remembers, “and I began spending a lot of time with her in assisted care. I saw how much she started talking about her life. The whole staff gathered around at an appointed time for the intake part. And they would ask her one question and she’d talk for about 40 minutes. I could tell that it was the highlight of her week.”

Initially, Salzer wanted to enlist some of her high school playwrights who were seeking weightier material and texture for their stories. “But I figured,” she says, “I better not jump in with too many unknowns. So I asked young professionals to be my partners . . . they knew about structure, they knew how to find character.”

Salzer gathered five playwright-actors, ranging in age from 25 to 40, and paired them with five Kearney residents. “Everyone was stunned,” she says, “because it wasn’t just wonderful stories, it was a kind of theater that was thrilling. It was art.”

The Los Angeles segment of Lifestages debuted early this year with the help of a $10,000 grant from the Maxwell H. Gluck Foundation. The L.A. project will stretch the money to cover six nursing homes, and pay numerous actors and writers for their time and dedication. “But they do it for love and belief,” says Salzer, who has benefited greatly from word-of-mouth within the drama community.

Actor and playwright Laurel Ollstein, who coordinates the L.A. segment of Lifestages with Playwright’s L.A. coordinator Kathryn Johnson Schwartz, says she joined the fold because as an artist she was moved not only by the scope of the dramatic revelations, but by its larger therapeutic potential.

“I come from a family of therapists,” she says, “and I also know how much art can bring to people. There are all these people sitting in these dark little rooms all over the city with these incredible stories. You just have to listen to and respect them.”

*

Already, the L.A. contingent has had performances at Alice Manor in Watts and Sunset Hall in Mid-City. And an Aug. 21 performance is set for Angelus Plaza, located only steps away from downtown’s historic Angels Flight.

But far more complex than identifying the sites, Ollstein says, is making the right matches between storyteller and playwright, a sensitive business that must take into account everything from race to gender to politics: Who will mine the best story? Who will give it its most resonant voice? And just what new, dramatic shading will an outside voice bring to an oft-told family tale?

The first moments of meeting between storytellers and artists oftentimes test and toy with the latter’s perceptions and misconceptions.

“It was the physical sight of seeing the storyteller sitting there,” says writer Doris Baizley. “Most of them are fragile, but they would come out with these stories in this full-bodied voice that was actually vigorous and strong. I think the import of project is to give voice to those ideas. Their memories and observations aren’t aged or weak or fragile. The mind stays alive and vital.”

There are only a couple of rules that Ollstein and Salzer set forth. Most important is that the storyteller retains the final say on content. And, second, the playwright should strike a careful creative balance, neither dwelling on a life’s more tragic aspects nor sugarcoating its resolutions.

“You have to be careful not to focus on: ‘God, she had such a depressing life,’ ” Ollstein explains. “This isn’t just for us, this is for them. And obviously they are survivors. There is something in their life that keeps them going and we have to find out what that is.”

Finding that briefly vexed playwright-songwriter Stephen Wolfson. “I came home from my first interview with Glady [Foreman] and thought, ‘If I write this as a straight play it would be too depressing, too dark,’ ” he recalls of their Sunset Hall meeting. “There’s inherent drama in the piece, but I thought the only way to pull this off is to do it to music because it has this opera-esque feel already.”

And how did Foreman, 88, feel hearing the intimate elements of her past set to guitar and voice?

“It takes a lot to upset me at this age,” she cracks from her front-row critic’s post at the Sunset Hall performance, shaking her head. “The main thing was that listening helped me see how obsessed I was with having a child because my father didn’t love me. I didn’t think any man would love me.”

*

For Carlson, talking unlocked a vault of cloaked details linked to self-esteem.

“She told me she wrote a book but couldn’t tell me what it was about, except that maybe it had something to do with motion pictures,” Lebano explains.

“So I went to the library. And the librarian brought out a huge stack of books. I was expecting a nice gardening book. Not the bible for the industry on camera operation. It’s jarring that you could have accomplished all this and not remember.” (Carlson coauthored professional books with her husband, Vern. Among them are “The Professional Cameraman’s Handbook,” “The Professional 16 / 35mm Cameraman’s Handbook” and “The Professional Lighting Handbook.”)

Sobering moments of revelation such as these make this project not just a sentimental journey, but a critique of the present and future.

“The older I get, the less I get asked in this society,” says playwright Baizley. “Everyone wants to hear the youngest, the strongest. The media believe that it’s important to hear robust voices--but what they forget is that your thoughts and feelings don’t get weak.”

Only stronger.

“I’ve been in this field 17 years,” says Barbara Stump, director of admissions and social service at Kearney Mesa Convalescent Hospital, where Lifestages made it debut. “There is a negative stigma about nursing homes. And this is a wonderful way to show why we do what we do, because of the people and the difference they’ve made in the world. They deal with so many losses. This is a gift to them. This is something that they are giving to their families.”

And let’s not forget to each other, Foreman emphasizes:

“It’s a good thing not to keep everything locked up in yourself. You eat with people day in and day out, but we don’t always know pertinent things about them. We keep it to ourselves.

“But with something like this,” continues Foreman, eyes alive, sitting at the center of post-performance attention, “you learn that you’re not alone, that lightning has struck their lives too.”