Anatomy of a Hug (review)

Spoilers ahoy!

A thought about genre. 

At a writers' conference an editor once said genre is something artists like to play with, while publishers use it to try and steer customers to a book.  I didn't and don't regard those as irreconcilable.

Anatomy of a Hug, for example, by Kat Ramsburg might find its best audience via such a descriptive.  It is in some ways a melancholy rom-com.

Which really doesn't do nearly enough to describe the play, so allow some explanation.  Amelia (Meg Wallace) is a sad young woman as we meet her, allowing a sick old woman into her home named Sonia (Kathy Bell Denton).  A social worker named Iris (Leslie Thurston) comes along, giving some hint of officialdom, of bureaucracy, the notion of some intense history.  Yet when left alone, Amelia and Sonia behave pretty much like strangers.  At the same time, they walk on eggshells.  Amelia insists "No personal questions!"

Eventually we do learn the situation.  Sonia is Amelia's mother, who has spent decades in prison for the murder of her husband and Amelia's father.  Now, as she enters the final stages of a terminal cancer, Sonia has been granted compassionate release.  In all this time, her daughter has never visited her.  Never written.  Naturally one wonders why she agreed to allow this stranger into her small apartment?

Credit: Mikel Fox

So, like an onion, the details of her life peel away.  She works selling charity memberships by phone, a charity that helps desperate, often abandoned children overseas.  It does not pay well, but enough.  Evidently she's very good at it.  Yet hardly anyone knows her.  A co-worker who also shares the same bus, a relentlessly friendly gentleman named Ben (Jo Sung), finally works up the courage to speak to her.  Amelia freaks in response.  Quietly, unobtrusively.  But still, she's freaking out.

She lives, we learn, amid a dreamland made up of t.v. shows.  She has a whole library of DVDs.  When showing the tiny apartment to Sonia, she explains about Hulu, Amazon, Netflix and her Roku (Sonia barely understands a word).  In fact, Amelia has an enormous emotional investment in these make-believe worlds and characters, seeing them as worthy of deep loyalty. 

What she doesn't want (or says she doesn't want) is for Sonia to explain anything, even though her mother insists on doing it anyway.  After all, she isn't the same human being as before.  Rather than asking for forgiveness, she wants Amelia to merely understand, to answer the questions that much have haunted her.  This will be the last chance.

Credit: Mikel Fox

So what we view and hear and feel becomes the start of real healing for Amelia, whose life clearly is about as empty as anyone's can be.  The symbol of the prisoner granted compassonate leave then setting her daughter free in an act of compassion might be a little on the nose (okay, squarely on) but one cannot deny it works.  I did not feel sucked into these lives, feeling a desperate hope for them to someone emerge from a nightmare.  But I did like them.  They seemed alive (and that is about as much praise as any actor manages to earn) and their pain quite real.  It wasn't that complex a pain and to be honest the healing was almost too easy compared to some plays.  But it felt true.  I felt a strong hope Sonia would manage to heal her daughter, or at least help her do it.  This was all she had left.  Yet would be everything. 

So kudos to this simple, moving story of broken hearts and tender hearts and dying hearts and hopeful hearts and also more than a couple terrified hearts. 

Anatomy of a Hug plays Fridays and Saturdays at 8pm, Sundays at 7pm until December 7, 2018 at the Sherry Theatre, 11052 Magnolia (east of Lankershim), North Hollywood CA 91601.