Photo by Ryan Blomquist
In Tandem Theatre’s Lamps for My Family is a challenging one-man show meditating on the meaning and scope of family in this world and the next. Mark Corkins plays Jack Duddy, who has returned to his childhood home, which during his youth housed, “at any given time, 14-20 residents.” Despite his insistence that he’s just experiencing “vivid memories” rather than interacting with ghosts, Jack finds himself in dialogue with more than 20 deceased relatives, each symbolized by a lamp.
A daunting task for any actor, the role requires not only an impressive feat of memorization but the creation of each distinct voice and personality. Aside from a slight breathlessness in transitioning from one voice to another and in handling rapid exchanges between characters of dissimilar vocal range, Corkins rises to the challenge commendably. In general, his dialect work (and there are many dialects to be juggled!) is polished, and he plumbs the emotional depth of many of his relatives’ stories quite affectingly. Particularly memorable are Jack’s interactions with his father, an aggressive ex-pugilist bouncer who once clocked his young son across the face but later “turned into Mickey Mouse” after a stroke, becoming emotionally expressive to the point that, “by the end, we understood each other.” Also memorable is his portrayal of his sister, Kick, an alderwoman and Wiccan who defied their family’s Irish Catholic rigidity to go her own way and who always had a word of support and wisdom for Jack.
Michael Neville’s script, based on his own large Irish American family, is full of humor, horror and the mundanity of real life. Although some of the anecdotes ramble and it is difficult to find a throughline, it contains numerous interesting features, including an insightful window into Irish American culture (exploring the “oral tradition of vicious gossip” is particularly fun); Jack’s growth in self-knowledge as he reflects on his unasked-for “affinity for outsiders”; and reflections on aging, changing roles and inter-generational interplay.
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Technical elements are strong. Director and Scenic Designer Chris Flieller brings us into an elaborate living room chock-full of the play’s namesake lamps. Joey Welden’s lighting design is challenging to say the least and Production Manager/Board Operator Colin Gawronski deserves high praise for facilitating the numerous and essential shifts in the semi-sentient lamps.
A nuanced reflection on family and the difficult task of psychologically integrating one’s life experience without allowing the past to dominate the present, Lamps for My Family is an interesting view.
Through March 13 at the Tenth Street Theatre, 628 N. 10th St. For tickets, call 414-271-1371 or visit intandemtheatre.org.
