Interactive ‘Brilliant’ picks up bits of memory
Memory is a slippery thing. That’s especially true in Mill Valley-based playwright and performer Denmo Ibrahim’s new interactive online play “Brilliant Mind,” in which memories spill out in fragments, some of them triggered by the viewer’s choices.
Co-produced by Marin Theatre Company and Storykrapht — a new artistic partnership between Ibrahim and Marti Wigder Grimminck to reimagine theater in the digital realm — the show melds both live and pre-filmed scenes. Occasionally the viewer is asked to choose between two different threads of the narrative for individual scenes, choose-your-own-adventure-style. Though inevitably the story winds up in the same place, different viewers don’t see all the same parts along the way.
It’s a story of two adult siblings who have come to bury their long-estranged father. Ibrahim is brisk and businesslike but also grounded as younger sister Dina, who keeps fielding work emails on her phone and shrugs off the sacrifices and concessions that the Palestinian American family had to make to fit in with neighbors who didn’t accept them anyway. Her older brother Yusef, played by Ramiz Monsef with an acute sense of being uncomfortably adrift in life, remembers the hate they encountered much more acutely. He’s also more inclined to forgive their parents’ failings than Dina is, largely because he was less impacted by them.
Directed by Kate Bergstrom, the performances are nicely nuanced and natural, exuding the easy camaraderie and comfortable annoyance of family.
We get occasional glimpses (just one in the version I saw) of their mother, who’s not coming to the funeral but checks in to nitpick by phone, portrayed with motherly persistence by Golden Thread Productions founding artistic director Torange Yeghiazarian.
The only live performer is the dead character, Samir. We keep returning to him between scenes with his children, and
sometimes he lurks in the corner of the screen commenting on their conversation. Sitting in a cozy den, he’s aware that he’s dead and seems to take it relatively in stride, philosophizing and rationalizing away his regrets.
Although Kal Naga plays Samir with compelling, thoughtful equanimity, his ruminations about the nature of life are ultimately not particularly interesting. The viewer is left grasping for tiny morsels of his actual story that may or may not even be true.
In some ways, the story might seem to center on Samir and the mistakes he made, but ultimately we only even hear about those things elliptically in passing.
What’s really important is how his children are left to work though all the complicated feelings that they’ve never had a chance to resolve. It’s no wonder that the real dramatic energy in the show is in the scenes with Ibrahim’s Dina and Monsef’s Yusef as they argue and bond over shared regrets and family traumas that they remember quite differently.
Their scenes look more like fragments of a movie than a play, shot out and about in the world from multiple angles with engaging cinematography by Matthew Boyd and editing by Corwin Evans.
It’s all woven together in a compelling package with user-friendly digital and interactive design by Grimminck. In fact, it’s all much smoother than one might expect after all the friendly warnings about possible glitches and frequent reminders to shut down all other applications and browser windows beforehand. (The preshow material includes a virtual tour of Samir’s home that didn’t really work at all on my laptop, which seemed like it might be an ill omen but wasn’t.)
Participants get frequent text messages along the way, ostensibly from Samir, commenting on whatever scene they’re watching and sharing family photos. The texts don’t add much to the experience, though that might depend on how inclined one is to text back and make it a conversation.
As innovative as the fragmentary structure is, there isn’t much about it that suggests that the story particularly needed to be told this way. In fact the segments themselves remain largely linear in the path I took, merely skipping over some scenes that sometimes seem like odd things to omit.
How well the fragments come together into a satisfying whole may depend on which pieces one happens to see.