- December 17, 2024
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Thank You Five is trying to become Port Orange’s next great performing arts theater, and they’re not without experience.
Run by Carrie Van Tol and Terence Van Auken, the nonprofit theater is putting on its performance of “Marjorie Prime” over the next few week.
Van Auken and Van Tol are both Port Orange residents with over a decade in local theater experience. The pair is currently dating, and Van Auken has a prominent role in Thank You Five’s newest show.
The play begins with Marjorie, an 85-year-old woman with severe memory problems wasting away her days in a leather recliner opposite a man young enough to be her grandson, but who turns out to be her husband — her dead husband, but a much younger version.
Walter is a computer-programmed, pixel-generated companion, known in the play as a "prime," and is brought in to keep Marjorie's mind from decaying any further. "Marjorie Prime" explores the subject of memory from a variety of angles, including senior dementia and society’s ever-increasing dependence on technology.
Jordan Harrison’s Pulitzer Prize-nominated drama also grapples with the way humanity is shaped by one’s ability to recollect. Tess, Marjorie's daughter, is suspicious of the prescribed therapy. But Jon, Tess's husband, is enthusiastically on board, offering background information about his mother-in-law's salty past to make the prime more intelligent.
Since much of the family’s history is disclosed, the play asks the audience to piece together the various narratives like a detective.
Complicating matters is that not everything fed to the primes turns out to be true, though the fabrications inevitably reveal much about the fears and desires of the fabricators. As the family’s interactions deepen, they begin to develop diverging recounts of their lives, drawn into the chance to reconstruct the past.
Thank You Five’s production of “Marjorie Prime” is directed by Matthew MacDermid and stars Jonnette DeMarsico as Marjorie, Jimbo Moyle as Walter, Robin Moyle as Tess, and Van Auken as Jon.
