It’s never an easy task putting together a show, and the character Anna trying to mount a production of a play based on her personal history finds her play is no exception.
She sits to the side of the stage, script in hand, watching two actors rehearse as the sisters Anna and Liza wrestle in different ways with a difficult mother.
Liza, wearing headphones, wants time to herself after an altercation with her mother. Anna wants to calm the tense situation before leaving the family home again after her short visit.
The trouble is, Liza sees that as part of the problem. Anna can escape, while Liza has to face a constantly unpleasant mother. When Anna tries to point out that the title of Liza’s play, Forgiving My Mother, provoked her, she replies, “we both know that anything, literally anything that comes out of my mouth provokes her.”
However, the friction between them suddenly takes a more complicated turn when the character Emilia, the actor playing Liza, starts questioning the lines and the psychology of what is happening. This increasingly irritates Anna, who claims that the director is overly tolerant of Liza and “unfair” to her. She also tells the writer that things might have been easier if they had not kept the characters' names the same as the real people they are modelled on.
As things heat up, Emilia decides to put her case to the audience, arguing that, “this play has no resolution, no ending no moral compass.”
This short, fifty-minute, occasionally funny play-within-a-play thoughtfully considers the troubled relationships of East European migrants who clearly care for each other despite some bruising encounters and the current difficulties of having to stay in the family home into your twenties because of housing costs.
It is confidently performed by a cast that includes the versatile Emilia Nurmukhamet as Emilia / Liza and Pat Dynowska as Pat / Anna. The ever-patient director Anna trying to keep the performance moving is played by Anna Udras.