Theatre in Review: The Institute of Memory (Under the Radar/Public Theater)Do any of us ever really know our parents? Possibly not; to some extent we are doomed never to fully understand the experiences that shaped them long before we existed. If you agree with this notion, just imagine how Lars Jan feels about it. When he was 20 months old, his mother sneaked him out, under cover of night, from their apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts, taking them away to a new life on Boston's South Shore. A few years later, Jan began asking about his father, whom they had left behind, so his mother began dropping the boy off, once a month, in Cambridge, for visits that were rarely comfortable. True, his father, Henryk, once bought him a dog and trained it. But what parent ever gives his five-year-old son a book by Gore Vidal? Or an expired can of Old Spice as a birthday present for his mother? Henryk also threatened to send Jan to London, separating him from his mother, to live with Henryk's sister. This aunt, by the way, was all Jan knew of his family: When asked where he was born and who his family members were, Henryk would only reply "I don't know" -- if he said anything at all. The Institute of Memory, produced by the group Early Morning Opera, traces Jan's attempts at piecing together the details of Henryk's life to try to get some sense of who this remote, enigmatic figure really was. Because Henryk was born in Poland before World War II, an unusual, but somewhat rich, source of information was found: The Institute of National Memory in Warsaw (hence the title), the vast archive of records kept -- first by the Nazis and later by the Communists -- on their own citizens. Because these records exist, Jan becomes a kind of spy himself, chasing Henryk across the murky terrain of his past. During the war, Henryk was a member of the Polish resistance, captured and tortured by the Nazis. He eventually made his way to London and then to America, where he became a "McCarthy-approved anti-Red" spokesperson. He also worked as a social scientist. But there are mysteries within mysteries. At the Institute of National Memory, Jan finds transcriptions of phone calls between Henryk and members of his family in 1958, when he returned to Poland for a visit. The dialogues are strangely elliptical and evasive, reflecting, Jan believes, the knowledge that their phones were tapped. (Having an American defector in your family was probably not the way to stay out of trouble.) He also finds records from Soviet spymasters who made contact with Henryk in the US, believing him to be a CIA operative. As the files show, Henryk seemed to cooperate with them -- unless he was just stringing them along. Then again, could a man who all but retired from the world, inhabiting a basement apartment for decades, really have been involved in anything like espionage. In Jan's words, the basement was a "bunker" where Henryk hid from the world, never totally certain that was safe. He adds, "My father's survival instinct was to erase himself." This is especially true later on; his health declines, yet he refuses to be examined by doctors who despair over his poor health habits. The Institute of Memory is an intriguing, affecting tale of a man in pursuit of a lost father, who, sadly, remains an ever-receding mirage. Performed by a cast of two (Sonny Valicenti as Jan and others, and Andrew Schneider in a variety of roles), the piece refracts the action through a series of effective theatrical devices. The voices of those long-ago telephone calls are faintly distorted and accompanied by static, sounding like radio signals from some distant, unreachable location. A series of black-and-white projections -- of unidentified buildings, photos of his father in Poland in 1958, and oddly faceless men -- loom large, many of them, circling in menacing fashion; some of the most haunted images include X-rays taken during Henryk's last years, documents obtained by Jan after he discovered that his father had died. Most attention-getting is a grid of white light that, at first, is hung over the stage. It is apparently linked, via some kind of show control, to the typewriter used in the sequence that quotes from Henryk's spy file. Each keystroke affects the grid, causing some portions to become illuminated and others to go dark. Later, the grid will be lowered to the ground, forming a kind of boundary that is especially effective in passages where the son tries to recall the ground plan of Henryk's bunker. Both actors are highly effective at slipping in and out of various characters; Valicenti captures Jan's bewilderment as he sifts through the evidence, looking for a man who isn't there. The stark, spare production is, nevertheless, a technically challenging one. Jan is credited with stage design, but Pablo Molina is credited with video design, interactive software, and systems integration; Christopher Kuhl with lighting design; and Nathan Ruyle and Mikaal Sulaiman with sound design. Schneider also is responsible for the interactive typewriter. The 3-D animations and additional video content is by Ting Zhang. It's unclear to me why two costume designers were needed for a production with only two costumes, but, anyway, the credit goes to Kate Fry and Stephanie Petagno. Ultimately, The Institute of Memory begins to decline in interest as Jan, frustrated in his search for truth, seems to be searching for a conclusion that can be drawn from all this mystery. For this reason, he might look at trimming and tightening the final sequence. A haunting piece by any standard at 80 minutes, it could be a real knockout at 70. -- David Barbour 
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