So many blueberries, so little time

"Memory House," which I have been working on at the Vineyard Playhouse, starts its public previews tomorrow night. Written by Kathleen Tolan, it's a drama set on New Year's Eve in the New York apartment of office worker Maggie (Kathy Baker) and her adopted teenage daughter, Katia (Natalia Payne). More than a decade ago, Maggie and her then-husband went to Russia to pluck 6-year-old Katia out of a dismal orphanage. But no good deed goes unpunished, as Maggie learns when Katia, faced with the prospect of writing a college application essay about her past, finally begins to express the anger about her confused past that's been building up over the years.

While Katia stews, Maggie bakes, whipping up a blueberry pie as a kind of domestic defense mechanism in the hopes of distracting her daughter and calming her down. The play begins with Maggie bringing in the groceries needed to make the pie and ends with the pie coming out of the oven, (hopefully) in all its splendor. If Maggie doesn't follow the necessary steps at the proper times, not only does she fall out of sync with the script, she also risks ruining the dessert.

So, for the past week and a half, the "Memory House" team has been trying to coordinate great acting with a sort of Blueberry Bake-Off. We are fortunate to have Kathy Baker as our champion. Kathy is a world-class performer -- while she is perhaps best-known as the villainous trampy housewife in "Edward Scissorhands," she's also given marvelous performances in such films as "Street Smart," "Cold Mountain," "Permanent Record" and, my personal favorite, "Clean and Sober" and she starred in the original production of Sam Shepard's "Fool for Love" -- and a delightful woman. But I'll reveal her secret: She also lives up to her name.

Although she is playing a woman who barely knows her way around a kitchen, in real life Kathy studied at the Cordon Bleu in Paris and had a career as a pastry chef. She created wedding cakes and cream puffs to pay for her theater classes, and she told me the challenge of "Memory House" has been trying to keep her natural flair for cooking from coming through in the performance. "It's as if I'm a ballerina who has to pretend I can't dance," she said.

In early rehearsals, she merely mimed the kitchen work, pantomiming rolling out the dough and mashing together the butter and Crisco for the crust. But for the past week, she has actually been baking a pie a day, which means I have consumed more blueberry pie in the past few days than I have ever eaten in my entire life up to this point. Kathy plays around with the recipe, sometimes adding a little extra sugar, sometimes putting in more lemon, sometimes letting the berries and cornstarch thicken a few more minutes; I must add every one of her variations has been delicious. I don't know what will happen to her pies when we get a paying audience in the house, but for now, director Claudia Weill, stage manager Kate Hancock, Natalia and I are greatly enjoying the fruits of her labors.

I'm the assistant stage manager on the show, which means I am something of a troubleshooter. If Kathy or Natalia need prompting with a line, I'm there following along in the script to give them the right words. I make the emergency lemon runs to Tony's Market or Stop and Shop. And Kate and I get to set up (and clean up) Maggie and Katia's apartment every night, which is almost as challenging as making a perfect pie. While "Memory House" is only one scene -- the two characters never leave the stage and don't change their costumes -- it involves dozens of props, ranging from teddy bears to broken video cassettes to rolling pins, butter cutters, computer printers and more. Things are messy as the play begins and a bit messier when it ends, 70 minutes later.

In addition to having a new appreciation for blueberry pie, I have a new appreciation for the magic of the dishwasher, since the Playhouse does not have one and I must do all the dishes by hand in the sink. Do you know exactly how many bowls, pans and utensils are required to make a pie? So many that I have established a close and intimate relationship with the cucumber/aloe lotion we keep on the set. Blueberry pie may tickle the tummy, but cucumber and aloe soothe the skin, which is just as important.