“Every act of perception, is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination.”
―Oliver Sacks

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Welcome to the world of memory and imagination, most specifically Masha Obolensky’s interpretation of the extraordinary mind and life of Vanessa Bell’s. This theatrical adventure is not attempting to be historical, but an exploration of how our internal life is created:  how our personalities are formed by our interactions, how our memories shape the writing of our future narratives. Vanessa Bell is a unique character, as is her amazing Bloomsbury circle, and her more famous sister, Virginia Woolf.  But what draws me to Masha’s work is her ability to capture in their genius and idiosyncrasies their raw emotional make up, and how this allows all of us to see ourselves refracted through the lens of their experience.

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You are the first audience ever to see this work. It is always thrilling to premiere a new American play, but even more so at this time when we are creating it in a new form, one foreign to most of us as a canvas.  This company of actors and artisans and designers—mostly students at Emerson—have worked tirelessly over the last six weeks to tell this story.  We hope it will speak to you as it has to all of us, and remind you that memory is an act of imagination, and our imaginations are how we create our life stories.

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An enormous thank you to the staff and faculty of Emerson Stage, who have “pivoted,” as the contemporary jargon has it, so gracefully and fully to allow a production of this scale to happen virtually.  It has been a true act of imagination to reconfigure what has always been live performance into this virtual reality. Welcome into this world of Vanessa Bell’s imagination, and to her journey of learning her story, and learning how to go forward.