THEATER REVIEW : A ‘Mommy Dearest,’ With Love

“Memory Tricks,” the San Diego premiere of Marga Gomez’s monologue about her mother, an exotic Puerto Rican dancer, is a “Mommy Dearest” done with love.

Although Gomez jokes about the vain, guilt-inducing and wildly eccentric mother who raised her, it is clear that she loves the woman, treasures the memories and clings to those rare fragments in time when her mother did, miraculously, say just the right thing.

“Memory Tricks” is performed in the first-person, confessional genre of Spalding Gray, but it is more funny than witty and more nakedly emotional than intellectual. Still, while the work is moving, David Ford’s direction could be tighter. At two hours, the show is too long on narrative shtick and could use more insight about Gomez and her mother. Also, Gomez’s delivery opening night needed more confidence.

But all that may come in time. This show, which premiered in San Francisco last year, is Gomez’s first full-length monologue, and she possesses the essential quality that a monologuist must have--a distinct voice with something to say. The rest is just a matter of polish.

The show, produced by Lynda Sterns in association with Fresh Dish, continues at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company’s Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre through Aug. 30.

Gomez’s Harlem upbringing seems to have been right out of a “What Not to Do to Your Kids” book.

Against a simple backdrop of a bench and street lamp, Gomez tells how when she was 7, her mother and her father, a Cuban-Spanish television personality, would routinely ask her which parent she loved more. She would start off trying to be diplomatic about it, and when that wouldn’t wash, she picked her mother in the hope that her mother would then take her on a picnic.

As she grew up, her mother’s idea of quality time was taking the young Gomez shopping--which Gomez loathed. Or to threaten to send her to charm school--the equivalent of threatening the child with the bogyman.

Gomez’s mother was impossibly imposing to her young daughter; she was tall, beautiful and heavily perfumed, with a penchant for tight, flashy clothes, while her daughter, as everyone said, looked just like her short, unglamorous father.

But “Memory Tricks” is also about the tricks that memories play. As Gomez grew up, her mother grew fragile. She divorced Gomez’s father and married a man who made her quit the dancing she loved. She ran away from her second husband to Paris, without leaving any forwarding address. Gomez flew there to look for her, already starting to become a mother to her own mother.

Finally, her mother developed Alzheimer’s disease, the cruelest of memory tricks. As she lost her ability to articulate and take care of herself, Gomez stepped in to help. Now Gomez tells the story her mother will never be able to tell for herself again--the story of her life.

Refracted through the eyes of a daughter, the story is somewhat like Sheri Glaser’s tales of her mother (among others) in her hit show, “Family Secrets,” which played two recent runs at the Gaslamp.

Gomez’s story, like Glaser’s, deserves to be told, not because their mothers were famous--they were not--but just because “attention must be paid” as Arthur Miller so eloquently wrote in “Death of a Salesman.”

It is healing to hear the tales of these bonds--of what continues, what is improved upon and what is irretrievably lost with each passing life. And, although Gomez’s work here needs some improvement, this material is good enough to leave you wanting to hear more.