During the pandemic lockdown, playwright Noga Flaishon spent a lot of time thinking a lot about the intersection of technology and memory. One play she was working on then was Lethe, a cyberpunk story about a woman who gets a chip implanted in her brain that removes all memory of a trauma she experienced. The other, Memoriam, now set for its world premiere at Houston’s Main Street Theater (March 29-April 19), explores the marketability of memories and what we owe to future generations.
“If you looked at my online footprint from that time, you would think I was just living in a state of constant creative bliss,” Flaishon said of that early pandemic time. “In reality, it was a struggle every day to find a reason to get out of bed.”
Set in the near future, Memoriam envisions a world in which people can rent memories and fully experience the sensations felt by the original memory-holder—like watching a movie, but more intimate. One buyer, Rachel, is out to acquire the memories of her grandmother, the last Holocaust survivor. Flaishon submitted the play to the Jewish Plays Project through the Jewish Playwriting Contest, where it garnered the support it needed for a full production.
If the concept feels a little Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, you wouldn’t be the first to notice the parallels. Flaishon, whose résumé includes writing and producing audio productions set in the world of the long-running TV series Doctor Who for Big Finish Productions, has been a sci-fi fan since she was a teenager. She also cites magical realism as a genre inspiration, as she works to write “reality that is like our own, but skewed a bit to the side.”
Memoriam, she said, is inspired by the fact that “in our lifetime, the Holocaust is going to become a story. It’s going to stop being a lived memory and will turn into something we just tell or watch in movies or read in books. Now is the time where we are grappling with the idea of what kind of story it’s going to be. Those are the questions that I wanted to ask.”
Jerald Raymond Pierce is the managing editor of American Theatre.
