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Clan bake

BY THE BOOK: The play may be a recipe, but the execution has zing.

Memory House is hardly a mansion of a dramaturgical edifice. Commissioned by Trinity Rep but first performed at Actors Theatre of Louisville and Playwrights Horizons, the mother-daughter drama is a sort of ’night, Mother Lite, lacking life-and-death stakes (though tell that to any frenzied family trying to extrude a college-application essay). But it is not without its graces, and they are fully realized at Trinity in a production helmed by artistic director Curt Columbus and held in perfect balance by veteran Anne Scurria and recent Brown/Trinity Rep Consortium grad Susannah Flood, the luminously awkward Emily of last season’s Our Town. Moreover, Eugene Lee’s slightly surreal setting, which floats the untidy living room and kitchen of a New York apartment under clinical lights flipped on and off by one of the actors and before a chalkboard backdrop bearing a childish doodle, lets you know that there is more going on here than a naturalistic display of pastry making and procrastination.

Tolan set out to explore the politics of international adoption. (Issues of parenting and adoption figure in several of her plays, including Approximating Mother and A Girl’s Life.) Katia was adopted at the age of six from an orphanage in Omsk. Indeed, Memory House begins with a grainy video of a child in an old-fashioned dress bouncing a ball and speaking in Russian — a sort of Wednesday’s Child–like parent-seeking advertisement. Now, the girl caught on the tape, spurred by her politically correct professor father, can’t decide whether she was rescued from a miserable life or stolen from a “bleeding” country by capitalist imperialists. “I’m your loot,” she informs the mother who wants the best for her but must tiptoe about the minefield of her daughter’s adolescent angst, which in Katia’s case is complicated by her feeling torn between a culture she can’t remember and one she’s rebelling against. The irony is that this teen, whatever her gene pool, is very much an American one, rolling her eyes and slouching around the place in a Ramones T-shirt, rap rolling out of stereo and earphones.