Review: Blackberry Winter

It can be a heartbreaking privilege to help a parent along the last part of his or her life journey. The experience contains the blessing and burden of push-and-pull emotions, daily life and impending death decisions, fractures in family structures and the unsettling role reversals. And when a parent is slip-sliding away into dementia, the caregiver’s luggage gets even heavier, as the main character in Capital Stage’s lovely and powerful Blackberry Winter slowly discovers.

Actress Amy Resnick gives a tour de force performance as the always-in-control daughter who’s trying to keep sane as her mom’s sanity is fading. Resnick is helped by the show’s beautiful, tragic and humorous dialogue, courtesy of playwright Steve Yockey, and under the thoughtful direction of Capital Stage co-founder Jonathan Williams.

Though the subject matter sounds dour, there is enough humor and sly self-deprecation in both the performance and the play to fully engage the audience. Resnick is Vivienne Avery, a woman who addresses the audience in short stories or reactions to her carefully structured life that’s now been interrupted and unraveled by her mother’s diminishing mental capacity. She grabs props that trigger emotions or remembrances, and projects her life as “a proactive care manager” who is learning how to “engage vs. control” her mother.

Blackberry Winter is basically a one-woman 90-minute show—though the flow is broken up by an animated fable narrated by two actors, Jacob Garcia and Sara Lynn Wagner. While the animation is a beautifully drawn animal myth that tries to explain dementia, it doesn’t move the story along.

Blackberry Winter is still a work-in-progress, with Sacramento one of seven cities involved in the play’s so-called “rolling world premiere”—a concept courtesy of the National New Play Network that workshops plays in different cities. As such, small bumps may be smoothed out along the way.