So Near and Yet So Far

“Last Lists of My Mad Mother” is one of the rare, quiet phenomena of the Los Angeles theater scene. Since it opened in late January at the Hudson Guild, the Julie Jensen drama has been kept alive thanks to its unexpected emotional impact, widespread critical praise and every play’s dream ingredient: return customers.

Originally slated to run until early March, it has been extended through May 14, which happens, poignantly enough, to be Mother’s Day. “The word of mouth is what’s kept us open,” says Hudson artistic director Elizabeth Reilly, who also performs in the play. “They’re coming back and bringing people.”

It’s as close as L.A. theater gets to a cult hit, and for good reason. A moving and often amusing portrait of an Alzheimer’s sufferer’s descent into dementia and the effect her deterioration has on her two very different daughters, the piece is both provocative and emotionally complex. Directed by Hope Alexander, it also boasts fine performances by three talented Equity actresses: Karlene Bradley, Kathleen Ward Marshall and Reilly.

Times reviewer F. Kathleen Foley found the play “wrenching and uplifting.” “This is not a play solely about Alzheimer’s,” she wrote. “The real business of the evening is the practical heroism and abiding family feeling displayed by ordinary people confronted with the disease.”

Indeed, “Last Lists of My Mad Mother” is no “disease of the week” drama. “It’s not just about somebody who’s losing their mental capacity, but about how all of us don’t say the things we wish we would have said,” says Bradley, who plays the matriarch, Ma. “It’s a very affirming play. I don’t see this as a play about Alzheimer’s; I see it as a play about love.”

A one-act ensemble piece, “Last Lists of My Mad Mother” was able to attract such a strong cast in part because it’s the kind of material with which nearly everyone finds some personal connection. “I wasn’t going to do it, but I read it and just loved it so much that I called [director Alexander] right away,” Marshall says. “I thought it was told in such an unsentimental, non-weepy kind of way.

“It rang so true to the experience my parents had with my grandmother and the experiences I had with her when she lived here in L.A., from the time I was 12 to about 15 or 16,” says Marshall, referring to her late paternal grandmother, who had Alzheimer’s and whose maiden name, Ward, was adopted by the actress as part of her Equity stage name. “Karlene has this look at the end of the play that is just like my grandmother.”

But Marshall is not alone in finding a personal resonance in the piece. “Across the board, people are somehow moved by this show--whether they’re thinking about a friend or a parent or a sister they haven’t spoken to in a long time,” Reilly says. “This is the kind of show everyone should see.

“There have been people who don’t leave their seats after the show,” she adds. “People walk out with sunglasses on.”

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Bradley was the one who discovered “Last Lists of My Mad Mother.” Originally commissioned by the Mark Taper Forum, the play was seen in a workshop presentation at the 1997 A.S.K. Theater Projects’ Common Ground Festival at UCLA, where Bradley came across the piece. The actress was already acquainted with the playwright, who is director of the graduate playwriting program at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

“I’ve had a relationship with Julie since 1986, when I did ‘Old Wives Tale’ at Theatre of NOTE,” Bradley says. “I just loved her work, so I kept in touch with her.”

She suggested to Jensen that she send the script to the Key West Theater Festival. The play premiered there in the fall of ‘97, with Bradley in the role of Ma. “Since then I’ve done everything I could to see if we couldn’t get a production of it in LA.,” she says.

Bradley also had acted with Reilly--played her mother, in fact--in a production of “Eleemosynary” at South Coast Repertory in 1991 and decided to bring the Jensen play to her. Reilly, a longtime force in the Los Angeles theater scene as both actress and producer, co-founded the Hudson Theatres nine years ago and is artistic director of the theater complex, which includes the 99-seat main stage and the 43-seat Guild space, where “Last Lists of My Mad Mother” performs.

“As an artistic director and a producer, I didn’t think it would be a big moneymaker, even if we got all the support of the critics, which we did,” Reilly says. “It’s still an uphill battle.

“But,” she adds, “I decided to do it anyway.”

In fact, Reilly felt so strongly about the play that she not only chose to present it, but to make the unusual move of acting in it as well. “In nine years of being artistic director at this theater, I have only acted here three times,” she says, “because I don’t find [roles] that are right for me.”

Reilly then brought the play to Alexander. The two had worked together in a production of “Park Your Car in Harvard Yard” at both the Fountain and Odyssey theaters. “I like the poetry in it and the relationships,” Alexander says. “I love the fact that it’s got three strong women characters and that it’s a mother-daughter story that’s fairly free of the usual cliched angst that you see in most mother-daughter stories. I like the blend of humor with the obvious pathos of the situation.”

Alexander in turn brought in Marshall, a versatile film-stage actress and producer seen recently in the film “Runaway Bride” last summer, as well as off-Broadway in “Chaim’s Love Song” and “Wrong Turn at Lungfish,” and locally in “Arsenic and Old Lace” at the Falcon Theatre, where she is a founding member. “Kathleen and I are old friends, and she fit right in,” says Alexander. “They’re a wacky group of broads.”

Once assembled, however, the company’s challenges had really just begun. All three roles are demanding in their own ways, as is being part of a trio that must seem credible as a family.

For Bradley, the task was to portray a character in the throes of a disease that remains largely incomprehensible. “The challenges were trying to put myself in the skin of somebody with Alzheimer’s because we don’t have information from them about what it feels like, because they can’t tell us,” she says.

Fortunately, she was able to draw upon her experiences working as an actress in the drama therapy programs offered by the nonprofit organization Stop Gap in Orange County. There she has come in contact with many people afflicted by Alzheimer’s.

“It became my idea that they are communicating, even when they’re not talking about things that anybody can relate to,” Bradley says. “I believe they know emotionally what’s happening, although they can’t verbalize it or relate it. And that was what drove my work in this production.”

For Marshall, who plays Sis, the task was in finding a way to enable the audience to relate to a sibling who is not the primary caretaker but who has a full life of her own. “I’ve never portrayed a non-caretaking character,” says the actress. “She isn’t really the bad guy, but she’s saying, these are my boundaries. And it’s very hard to change your role in the family.

“Our society says the caretakers are the ‘good’ ones, but I wasn’t angry at her, and that’s what made her attractive to me,” Marshall says. “I thought that Julie wrote with a level of honesty and made her not just a caricature of the kid that doesn’t show up.”

For Reilly, whose character is the primary caretaker, it’s a chance to play a role that she didn’t have in life.

“I lost my mother when I was 17 and she was 39, but I actually never did say goodbye to my mother,” she says. “I basically took her to the hospital and never went back. So for me, I get to say goodbye to my mother every night. When the lights are going out every night and I’m about to go on stage, I say, ‘This one’s for you, Mom.’ ”

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“LAST LISTS OF MY MAD MOTHER,” Hudson Guild, 6539 Santa Monica Blvd., Hollywood. Dates: Plays Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends May 14. Price: $18. Phone: (323) 692-2777.