Philip’s Boehm’s adaptation of Tom Holloway’s play “Forget Me Not” will premiere on January 31st, 2014 in the Upstream Theater in St. Louis.
Play’s Schedule Jan. 31-Feb 2, Feb. 6-9, 13-16 8 PM except Sundays at 7 PM
Feb. 16 at 3 PM only
Forget Me Not
Gerry is around 60 years old. His daughter Sally is fed up with him. He’s damaged and he’s doing damage. So she drags him to a social worker to finally get to the bottom of his childhood migration from Liverpool.
Mary is in her 80s, she lives alone in a small flat in Liverpool. She has never given up hope that her son will come home.
Forget Me Not started life as a conversation between Belvoir and Liverpool’s Everyman and Playhouse Theatres. Tom Holloway was commissioned to write a play based on the British-Australian child migrant scheme.
Between the end of World War II and 1970 over 3,000 children were taken from the UK and brought to live in institutions in Australia. These children were told their parents were dead; this was almost never true. They were forcibly taken from poor families and single mothers. They were promised a land of sunshine and oranges, where they would ride horses to school and never go hungry. Instead they were sent to work farms where they were at best unloved and at worst horribly abused.
Forget Me Not is a contemporary story about people today, living with the consequences of this program. Tom Holloway has written a series of raw, often achingly beautiful conversations between members of a scattered family. Drawing the whole thing together is Gerry’s extraordinary, precarious bid to finally learn what it means to love and belong to a family.
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Philip Boehm is the author of numerous translations from Polish and German prose and plays, including works by Franz Kafka, Ida Fink, Christoph Hein, Hanna Krall, Stefan Chwin and 2009 Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller. His work also inlcudes translation of the Herta Müller’s 2009 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.
Based in St. Louis, he is also a playwright and and artistic director of the Upstream Theater. Philip Boehm studied at the State Academy of Theater in Poland and has directed extensively on both sides of the Atlantic. Produced original plays include Mixtitlan, Return of the Bedbug, Amerika, and Kalkwerk for the Lincoln Center Theatre Festival. In 2012 he directed adaptation of Kazimierz Moczarski’s novel Conversations with Executioner (pol. Rozmowy z Katem). His work has earned various honors, including awards from the Austrian Ministry for Culture, the UK Society of Authors, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Texas Institute of Letters.
