Alzheimer’s patients require a special sort of tenderness. The smallest of daily rituals beg the boundless encouragement, patience, and love of the caregiver. Blossom, the story of an aging painter in the last seasons of his life, paints the plight of memory loss in bold, beautiful strokes.
The plot of Spencer Lott’s spectacle is straightforward: a 76-year-old scenic painter is submerged into his vivid past as it moves further away from him, leaving his daughter Kathryn to cope with the real-world struggles of fiscal and filial end-of-life responsibilities. Along the way, we meet fellow residents of his new home at the Garden City elder care facility, as well as Kelly, a volunteer art instructor who takes to Blossom as his painting protege. Kelly and Blossom develop his last project: a mural on the wall of his bedroom.
The crux of the play is the shift between a world colored by memory and a reality jarred by the loss of it. As we watch Blossom’s epic adventures unfold, we are reminded that imagination, that great amalgam of memory and fantasy, holds more truth than the physical body could ever show. The puppets engage with full-sized human caretakers. The loving exchanges evoke the complex feeling of childlike dependency against which an Alzheimer’s patient struggles to maintain their identity.
Spencer Lott’s design strikes a chord that is by turns whimsical and hyp-errealistic. The cast delivers this vision splendidly as they shift between speaking to and speaking as their puppet counterparts. Further compliments to Jamie Agnello as Kathryn and Chelsea Fryer as Kelly in their committed performances alongside Blossom’s big green chair.
With its glimmers of humor and tender theatricality, Blossom envelops the audience in a blanket fort of the mind. While looking at Blossom’s mural, his daughter laments that his painting skills are leaving him along with everything else. Kelly gently reminds her that though “he fills the space differently,” the mural is still his, “still so full of life.” When the lights fade, Blossom reminds audiences to celebrate a life well lived, especially in the face of death.
