Fissures (lost and found)

What is memory? Why is it that each time you remember the past, you forget and invent a little more of it? How does a place or a song conjure an experience that you didn't even know you had lost? In Fissures (lost and found), we roam through the fanciful, mysterious territories between recollection and imagination, loss and rediscovery, in a piece that playfully embodies the ever-shifting landscape of memory. The play begins quietly, as a young man searches the audience for the owner of a pair of lost keys, but discovers that the keys are his own. Soon another man arrives looking for a different set of keys, but ends up following a woman he thinks is his dead wife into an empty house that maybe he once lived in. Then, two siblings accidentally recreate their father's rages as they bump into walls they don't remember in their childhood home. Soon we are falling down comic, haunting rabbit holes of memory and forgetting, as the characters try to recall moments, people, and places of their past, which only slip further away the more they try to hold on to them. Combining physical comedy and poetry, Fissures (lost and found) is a meditation on the unreliability of memory, a window into the ways we each create our own narratives by piecing together fragments of our imagined and shared pasts. Fissures (lost and found) was commissioned by the Playwrights' Center and Actors Theatre of Louisville and premiered at the 2010 Humana Festival of New American Plays.