Aunt Dan and Lemon

By Courtney M. Holbrook

The Nazis may have had it right.

That’s the lesson Lemon, our protagonist, would like us to learn. Compassion and love — foreign feelings to a sickly girl feverishly remembering the dead and gone — circle like so much wasted space in playwright Wallace Shawn’s “Aunt Dan and Lemon.”

As performed by UGA’s University Theatre, the play is dominated by two sinister performances.

As Aunt Dan, an American studying at Oxford University, Jennifer Schottstädt gives us a seductive yet ultimately frightening performance.

As Lemon, a sickly woman with an even sicker worldview, Paige Pulaski gives us a woman who is seemingly frail, yet far more disturbing than we can imagine.

Set during 1970s Vietnam in London, the play follows a father and mother, their daughter, Lemon, and their American friend, Dan. “Aunt” Dan tells stories about her glamorous friends at Oxford. Lemon listens, enraptured by Aunt Dan’s tales of mob bosses and married professors.

But soon the audience comes to learn about Dan’s obsession with Henry Kissinger.

This obsession turns and turns, until suddenly Dan and Lemon are rationalizing murder, evil and oppression in the pursuit of the greater good. Dan takes Kissinger’s RealPolitick and applies it to her personal life, where the individual must dominate all others.

As we watch Dan’s friends act in increasingly horrifying ways, we also are forced to empathize with Lemon’s fascist, take-no-prisoners mentality on life. For this ill woman, strong and unfeeling people are to be praised, not shunned.

Set on a sparse set, the production pushes the audience to focus on the actors. Most of the time, that works. Aside from Lemon and Aunt Dan, Chelsey Horn gives a moving performance as Lemon’s mother. Hers is the one voice of real compassion in the show — and Dan’s Ciceronian verbosity shuts her down.

Though most of the cast works well with what is a linguistically challenging script, there are some problems. Spencer Tootle, as Mindy, is not believable as a cold-hearted, irresistible seductress. She is too childlike and blank-faced. She sometimes looks uncomfortable with the overt sexual evil of the character. At other times, she just looks confused.

The lighting focuses on the wrong parts of the stage. It’s a minor issue, but one that is a distraction from specific monologues.

In the end, this is a play whose dialogue dominates all else. It is Aunt Dan’s use of language that makes her the frightening force in Lemon’s life.

But it is Lemon who is the real terror. Her cheerful London accent chirps throughout the narrative. But it is when you really listen to her words that you realize the horror of who she is. For in Lemon’s world, compassion is futile, and political leaders such as Kissinger and Hitler are to be admired. This would be impossible without Pulaski’s deceptively terrifying performance.

“Aunt Dan and Lemon” reveals the terror of social acceptance toward evil, and the all too easy way in which good people can become heartless.