BROWNSTOWN

During his 22 years as a pastor, Horace Tucker visited with people in various stages of Alzheimer’s disease at their homes and in nursing homes and hospitals.

Now, he finds himself playing the role of a man with the disease, which is a type of dementia that causes problems with memory, thinking and behavior.

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In the Jackson County Community Theatre’s production of “Taking Leave,” he portrays Eliot Pryne, a professor of English literature specializing in Shakespeare who in the middle of the night packs what he thinks is a suitcase and leaving what he thinks is a hotel.

In the early stages of Alzheimer’s, he is “taking leave” of the real world and imagining a new one, but the transition is painful.

His alter ego, Eliot-1, mostly unseen except by the audience, charts this final voyage speaking as Eliot once did when he was the leading authority on Shakespeare’s King Lear.

The visit of Eliot’s three daughters, Alma, Liz and Cordelia, forms the central event of this oddly comic yet fully sympathetic drama. The decision whether or not to have their father put in a nursing home provides the central conflict among the three very different sisters.

Alma is a public school counselor, Liz is a television actress and Cordelia is the “ne’er-do-well vagabond,” who arrives in her black leather motorcycle outfit fresh from a year in Paris and a history of drug abuse.

The play is personal for Tucker because his mother died from progressive dementia subsequent to a stroke.

“She went from doing the Sunday crossword in ink to not being able to say a full sentence in a day,” he said.

When he read the “Taking Leave” script, he said he was instantly intrigued.

“I had a colleague in the ministry who lost both parents and at least one in-law to Alzheimer’s, and he had to come up with a whole page of the advantages of Alzheimer’s, and the script mentions there’s an advantage to this if you can accept it: You always live in the now,” Tucker said. “I asked him, ‘How can you find humor in this?’ and he said, ‘Well, the option is despair, and I refuse.’”

In the nearly two-hour play, the three sisters travel on the fringes of despair, and you will have to see the show to figure out who rescues it from despair.

“Taking Leave,” the theater’s 2018-19 season-opener, debuted Friday night and will be presented again at 7:30 p.m. today and Sept. 14 and 15 at Royal Off-the-Square Theatre, 121 W. Walnut St., Brownstown.

Tickets are available online at jcct.org or at Family Drug in Brownstown or Artistic Impressions in Seymour and are $12 for adults and $10 for students and senior citizens.

Because of a few strong words and a small bit of innuendo used by the characters during the play, it’s rated PG-13. Tucker said they toned down the language of the original script.

“You take people who were absolute saints beforehand, and as they progress through the disease, their language just falls apart,” he said. “On the other hand, you take people who lived an extraordinarily rough life and cussed like sailors all of the time, as they progress through Alzheimer’s, they get kinder and softer and gentler.”

Their personalities change from what they were to something new, as the play portrays, he said.

“The people are living in a new kind of age,” Tucker said. “They are adults living as children, and this show does an excellent job in this very brief span of three days in the life of this professor to condense that experience. … I didn’t find anything in this show that wasn’t true to form. It’s drama, but it’s not a false story. It’s real.”

Jordan McKinley plays the role of Eliot-1. In real life, he also is a pastor and has talked to parishioners with Alzheimer’s or dementia.

“It’s neat for me to kind of see it from a different side, playing the person that has Alzheimer’s essentially, although the rational side,” he said.

Playing the roles of the sisters are Karen Haas as Alma, Stacey Williams as Liz and Megan Keller as Cordelia.

Williams said the relationship between the sisters is what drew them in.

“I’ve got a little of all three of these girls in me,” she said, smiling.

“We wanted a chance to be in something together and to play sisters, and then reading the script, it was so real,” Haas said.

Keller said it was hard to choose which sister to portray.

“I think now, I’m the most like Alma, but I think in the past, I was more Cordelia. And who knows? Maybe I will be Liz one day,” she said, smiling.

“What I enjoyed about it is there are three sisters coming together who obviously have different personalities in trying to deal with their father in a degenerative state,” Keller said. “That’s hard to deal with to be the caretaker for someone who was your caretaker.”

Kathy Nelson plays the role of Mrs. Fleming, Eliot’s caretaker. She said she likes how one of the sisters winds up focusing on the positive in regards to their father.

“Her saying, ‘He’s not gone, he’s still here, he’s still a person and he’s transitioning and we just need to transition with him,’ I think that to me is the neatest thing because everything is cyclical in life,” Nelson said.

“To have the ability to just say, ‘I can stop and take care and be here’ is just amazing because so many times in life, we can’t because there’s our kids and our jobs and things that get in the way,” she said. “The ability that she has just to say, ‘I’m here. This is my purpose. This is what I’m supposed to do’ and just have that positive attitude is really amazing.”

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What: Jackson County Community Theatre’s 2018-19 season-opener “Taking Leave”

When: 7:30 p.m. today and Sept. 14 and 15

Where: Royal Off-the-Square Theatre, 121 W. Walnut St., Brownstown

Tickets: $12 for adults and $10 for children and senior citizens; may be purchased online at jcct.org or at Family Drug in Brownstown or Artistic Impressions in Seymour

Director: Paul Angle

Production manager: Matt Nieman

Stage manager: Job Willman

Characters: Eliot Pryne (Horace Tucker), Eliot-1 (Jordan McKinley), Alma (Karen Haas), Liz (Stacey Williams), Cordelia (Megan Keller) and Mrs. Fleming (Kathy Nelson)

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