Outgoing Tide on the Northlight Theatre in Skokie

Critics are raving about The Outgoing Tide! - and they are right.
We were at the reading last year (not with Rondi Reed) and it was already great. Deanna Dunagan was suberb and we hope to see the result later. now this year we really made it. And it was great. A sad but beautiful play.
We had the chance for a small talk with the director B.J.Jones. He was very friendly and pleased that we came back a year later.

Since we also met chris jones and hedi weiss during the symposium here are the reviews:

The Outgoing Tide' at Northlight:
Play about end-of-life issues shows Mahoney at his finest
by Chris Jones
Chicago Tribune
May 24, 2011

★★★½

Gunner, the memory-challenged central character in Bruce Graham's new play "The Outgoing Tide," is slowly losing his grip on the ebbs and flows of life. But whereas it must be tempting to play an elderly man suffering from the onset of Alzheimer's, or severe dementia, as a timid, nervous fellow, there is not a hint of that in John Mahoney.

Mahoney - whose performance in director BJ Jones' superb world-premiere production is, I think, the best work I've ever seen him do on stage - understands that the agony of suffering from progressive memory loss is not best reflected theatrically through trepidation and confusion. On the contrary, it is best expressed through strength. Only then do we understand what is being lost.

And thus, in a display of robustness that one does not typically associate with this most genial of actors, Mahoney shows us a proud, flinty man for whom the loss of lucidity is entirely intolerable. It is an exceptionally moving performance that hones in on one thing that family members dealing with loved ones in this all-too-common situation too little understand: the importance of dignity and personal pride.

"The Outgoing Tide," which is set on the shore of Chesapeake Bay, is, at its core, at exploration of how such a man as Mahoney's Gunner - forceful, well-prepared, a father, a husband, a kidder - can live with a seriously diminished mental capacity, and whether he is within his rights to not want to live with it at all. It is a very tightly focused piece about a family of three. Rondi Reed plays Peg, Gunner's earnest, straight-talking wife, and Thomas J. Cox plays his son. Events take place on a day when Gunner has called up his son and asked him to visit. Gunner wants to tell him about a plan to provide more for his family, and also to put himself out of his own increasing misery.

If you're in anything approaching this situation - with your parents, partner, or self - I think you'll instantly recognize how Graham zeroes in on recognizable truths.

There is the leadership vacuum that occurs when a powerful patriarch can no longer remember to wear his pants. And Cox carefully shows us the travails that come when a mild, only moderately successful middle-aged man must suddenly assert himself with his far stronger father, a relationship that is clarified through flashbacks that Jones interweaves beautifully into the action. There is the way that your parents' aging often hits you when you're least prepared to deal with it; you're stuck, perhaps, in a stressed-out slump of diminished career expectations and dealing with kids and a troubled marriage of your own. There are those tantalizing moments of normalcy, when you convince yourself that things are getting better or, at least, no worse. And, most moving of all, there is the impact of an aging parent on his or her spouse and the fundamental changes that take place, rarely for the better, in a relationship that may stretch back 50 years or more.

Which brings me to Reed. This is a quiet performance that's wholly the equal of the extraordinary work being done by Mahoney - and by Cox, for that matter. But there's something in its reticence, its truly agonizing reticence, that has been living with me since. As penned by Graham, Peg would rather get up from the table whenever anything being said around that table is painful. As she bustles around, rarely looking anyone in the eye, Reed submerges her famously forceful personality inside a woman whom we see, over a couple of hours of stage traffic, must finally try and face something. It is quite something to watch.

Gunner's desire not to live in a reduced way sends this play off into the thorny debates surrounding many end-of-life issues, which, in the final analysis, I find less interesting than the nuanced and very personal crises being forged by these actors. The play needs, I suppose, the dramatic tension posed by Gunner threatening to do one final, all-enveloping thing. But I confess to some resistance to that; in real life, when we are faced with the possibility of such loss, our tendency is to try and delay or soften it, rather than treat it as an all-or-nothing issue. That human impulse gets short shrift here in the interests of dramatic stakes.

But in terms of acting and directing, nothing whatsoever gets short shrift. This is a trio of towering performances, made all the more intense by the sense that any tower can, eventually, be toppled.

Read the review on chicagotribune.com>


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Two Tony winners, perfectly paired in ‘The Outgoing Tide'
BY HEDY WEISS
Chicago Sun-Times
May 24, 2011

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

There is a special timbre to an audience's laughter of recognition, and it was fully audible throughout Sunday's performance of "The Outgoing Tide," the Bruce Graham play now in its world premiere at Northlight Theatre.

There also is a special sort of pleasure that infuses a production in which two veteran actors, who have long since put a high gloss on their craft, get to play opposite each other. And you certainly can feel that as John Mahoney and Rondi Reed, each a Tony Award winner, give an informal master class in acting as they play a couple that has been married for 50 years and is now trying to negotiate the volatile currents of the end game.

The storyline in Graham's play is an increasingly familiar one these days as people live longer and must deal with the onset of Alzheimer's and other care-intensie diseases. There are decisions to be made - by the afflicted person who still can make them, by the aging but healthy spouse who clearly will need help caring for a deteriorating partner, and/or by the adult children of such a couple - a baby boomer already in full midlife mode. And invariably that classic question will arise: Whose life is it, anyway?

Graham has crafted a skillful, punchy piece that careens expertly between the painful and the comic, features a number of laugh-out-loud one liners (delivered with equal aplomb by Mahoney and Reed), and very deftly incorporates some elements of surprise. And director BJ Jones, along with the ideally cast Thomas J. Cox (whose wiry build and gaunt face suggests he easily could be Mahoney's son), captures the play's shifting moods ideally, putting its many other concisely limned themes (the father-son relationship, the plight of the only child, generational shifts in attitudes about marriage), into sharp relief.

Set on the patio of a wood shingle cottage on Chesapeake Bay (Brian Sidney Bembridge's handsome architectural set is down payment worthy), the play begins as Jack (Cox), pays a visit to his "old school" Irish Catholic parents, and finds himself caught in the middle of their opposing choices.

Gunner (Mahoney), well aware he is losing his mental faculties, is fiercely resistant to the sort of assisted living facility his exhausted and frightened wife, Peg (Reed), wants to move into. And he has his own dramatic alternative plan in mind - one that would insure the futures of both his wife (with whom he has a loving but prickly relationship), and his son (a father of three, now in the process of a divorce). As Gunner puts it, he has "loose ends" to tie up, and he knows time is running out.

Mahoney, whippet thin, fast-talking and sly, expertly captures the brutal frustration inherent in advancing Alzheimer's, while also suggesting the innate irascibility and cruelty Gunner was capable of as a younger man. Reed is wonderfully transformed in this role - determined and feisty, but softer than usual, and lighter of voice, so that she truly suggests Gunner's youthful emory of her as his working class Grace Kelly. And Cox deftly suggests that Jack is very much the product of his parents' long-running emotional tug of war.

Read the review at suntimes.com>