Does loving someone give you the right to ask them to remember?
In Sophie Davis’s Forget Me, Please, Andi and Sasha meet after concussions and build a life together. But as Andi’s mental health deteriorates, the memories holding their relationship together begin to mean radically different things. For Andi, memory preserves pain. For Sasha, the same memory preserves love.
The show places concussion beside trauma and asks why we readily understand one as an injury requiring treatment while expecting the other to be remembered, narrated and endured. Its answer remains beautifully unresolved: trauma is never carried by one person alone, but loving someone does not give you ownership over their pain.
Shannen Alyce Quan and Kala Gare are extraordinary, holding tenderness, frustration, dependence and humour without simplifying either‘s complexity. Jessica DiCosta’s finely controlled direction asks not whether they love, but whether love can survive when openness requires one person to re-enter her trauma and the other’s care cannot fix it.
Production designers Isobel Clare Sanby and Cristo Davis make memory physical. Pieces of the minimalist white set act as furniture throughout the fractured timeline, while simultaneously serving as a physical representation of the characters’ mental states; only after the forgetting procedure do all the pieces become whole. Subtle shifts in lighting give each period its own emotional temperature, while Jessica Meier and Alex Meier’s sound design draws us inside hospital machinery and psychological disorientation. From a desaturated world, some colour: life continues, but not necessarily together.
And then there are the sunflowers: first a word Andi’s injured brain reaches for when she cannot remember; later, a piece of private language returned to someone who can no longer understand why it matters. Sasha remembers. We remember. Andi does not.
Intelligent, intimate and utterly beautiful.
I said “birds”