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“Strange, the story I’ve heard –unsettling as a dream…”

In a Memory Palace concerns itself with the destabilization of memory and identity due to age, cognitive impairment, displacement, or social isolation. The main character, a Viennese Catholic who relinquished her privilege as an “Aryan” to flee Hitler’s Europe with her Jewish husband, has endured all these experiences and is haunted by confused memories. The script dramatizes the plight of the sequestered elderly, while acknowledging that family members must often divide their attention among loved ones each of whom, in theory, deserves undivided attention.

Playwright Edith Newton’s libretto follows the traditional structure and prosody of a Japanese Noh play. The work was conceived as a Noh play because of the extent to which Noh stages the phenomenon of a person’s being located in one place and time in the physical world but existing much more intensely in a world of memory.

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