The Art of Disappearing
by Stephanie Alison Walker

When Melissa receives a mysterious invitation to brunch from her mother after a two-year estrangement, she returns to a home where nothing is as it seems.

Fathers lie, friends leave, and she herself is failing in the artist's world she covets — as her mother practices the art of disappearing before her very eyes.

The devastating truth she discovers in her parents' house threatens to tear all of them apart for good.

Will Melissa stay and fight for her family?

Or will she disappear too?

"Stephanie Alison Walker's THE ART OF DISAPPEARING, now in a sharp and often emotionally vital world premiere … tackles the subject of dementia … The central figures in Walker's piece are a married couple and their grown child who has a conflicted relationship with the ailing parent.

But Walker's play take[s] a fresh and mostly unsentimental approach to the question of how much forgetting and forgiving we need to do in times of crisis … That confluence between a daughter who lies about herself when she feels parental pressure and a domineering mother who can't face her own diminishing mental capacities provides Walker's play with its strongest moments."

—Kerry Reid, Chicago Tribune

"The mother-daughter relationship is, to be sure, a complex one, with comedians frequently playing on a daughter's horrified realization that she is 'becoming' her mother.

In Stephanie Alison Walker's fierce and troubling play, THE ART OF DISAPPEARING … that realization assumes downright harrowing and tragic proportions as an already troubled daughter is confronted by the knowledge that her willful and still beautiful mother is suffering from early onset dementia … Dementia (whether in middle age or old age) has become the subject of a number of recent plays.

Walker has very skillfully observed the extreme mood swings and erratic behavior that can accompany it … Walker's play is full of surprises.

And it is rooted in the kind of harrowing truths few people want to confront."

—Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times