“Time is unforgiving and thoughtless” says one of the characters in Leonardo Moreira’s O Jardim, a perfect line to sum up this pithy, devastating play about the capricious cruelty of memory. Three stories from three different times share the same setting: a house with a prominent garden that becomes the central object of the characters’ conversations at one point or another. In one of the stories in which a husband (Thiago Amaral) and wife (Fernanda Stefanski) are discussing the end of their marriage, the garden doesn’t even exist yet, it’s about to come into fruition and the heartbroken woman asks the man how does it feel to know she planted the seeds he will enjoy with someone else? In another story, a lady (Aline Filócomo) and her maid (Paula Picarelli) are making a record of the house they’ve lost to a group of Polish “invaders” who have destroyed their precious garden. The other story has two daughters (Luciana Paes and Mariah Amélia Farah) readying their elderly father (Edison Simao) to go to a nursing home. The sisters go through photo albums and share their memories of the garden.

Despite the fact that the plot sounds rather traditional, the show is structured so that we as audience members become the key to unlocking its many secrets. The stage is divided into three units, each facing a group of the audience, who can’t see what’s going on “next door”. Then after about thirty minutes, each story moves on to the next panel where the actors repeat the scene they just played before. Only one portion of the audience gets to experience the story chronologically, but even that section is at first rather thrown off because they don’t know what to expect next.

If anything O Jardim is an exceptional work of direction, as Moreira effortlessly pulls off a complexly choreographed balancing act, that requires attention from the audience and the ensemble, given that during many occasions the parallel scenes compliment each other sonically and even visually (through the subtitles placed above each scene). Perhaps because the play is such a marvel from a technical perspective - its philosophical and spiritual ideas often flirting with physics (are memories too just “neighbors” in an apartment complex in our brains?) - we don’t expect its emotional punch to amount to much, and yet as it reaches its climax, O Jardim strikes with torrential force. The ending, if a bit overlong and not as subtle as the rest of the play, brings together all the stories as the characters become ghosts that make us wonder if memory is a blessing or curse. The true thing is that O Jardim is truly unforgettable.