Heart and mind Aunt Dan and Lemon’s dark wisdom BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Aunt Dan and Lemon By Wallace Shawn. Directed by Anthony Estrella. With Wendy Overly, Jeanine Kane, Casey Seymour Kim, Jim O’Brien, Melissa Penick, Steve Kidd, Kerry Callery, Georgia Cohen, and Ratkanhnha Siv. At the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre through February 22.

The life of the mind is generally regarded as an exalted state, with opportunity for high-minded discourse, wisdom even. Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, which the Sandra Feinstein-Gamm Theatre is powerfully presenting, shows the dark side that can come to the fore when thoughts are not grounded in the tangible.

Lemon is a childhood name for Lenora (Jeanine Kane), who is indeed arrested in the somewhat juvenile state of mind we all are in at times, drawn to facile answers. Frail of body, in her London flat in 1985, she survives frugally on a meager inheritance and fruit juices and buns. She hasn’t had many opportunities to gather life experiences. So she pores over her favorite memories with us, addressing the audience like a spinster with a family album in her lap who pats the sofa cushion next to her. She wants to share the recollections of the persons and ideas that shaped her, she says.

Lemon’s current obsession is to read all about the Germans and their hard work trying to exterminate the Jews. It was a shame and all, she acknowledges, but she wants to understand the Nazi point of view. It was unpleasant business, though you have to admit, Lemon says, that they did accomplish much of what they set out to do. But Hitler, that dead metaphor, isn’t the person to best personify to us the evil he represents. Henry Kissinger, his visage chalked large next to Der Führer’s on the wall behind her bed, is the man for that. And that’s where Aunt Dan, Lemon’s mentor, marches in.

Kane gives us a fully inhabited person in Lemon, charming and fascinating us so that we don’t dismiss the person along with her scary notions. But it is Wendy Overly as Aunt Dan, who rattles whatever complacency we might have about these proceedings, who shakes us to the core of our beliefs in human beings. Aunt Dan isn’t a relative of Lemon’s; she is a friend of the family, a tutor her American father had at Oxford.

Overly and director Anthony Estrella don’t rely on the shock of Aunt Dan’s ideas or the many opportunities to blast us back in our seats with her explosive temper. In flashbacks, as Lemon listens as a child, a fly on the wall, Overly cajoles, seduces, browbeats, intimidates, and displays the full spectrum of psycho-rhetorical enthusiasm that wins people over, whether the reward is agreement, votes, or souls. A magnificently nuanced performance.

Aunt Dan is in love with Kissinger, the Realpolitik statesman and architect of the diplomatic dimension of our Vietnam War strategy. She all but weeps at thinking about the melancholy look on his face and his burden of responding to the evil around us. Bombing peasant villages may be distasteful, but sometimes for a better world somebody’s got to do it. We can be civilized and nice, Aunt Dan argues to Lemon’s patient mother, because our governments are not nice — they are willing to kill for us.

In a crucial scene, Lemon’s mother offers the counterpoint for this argument, and Casey Seymour Kim provides just the right foil: frightened but adamant, politely asking — listen up, November voters — what if the perceived threat is a delusion? Lemon’s father represents another mode of delusion and its consequences, stuck as he is in a corporate marketing job he chose but is terrified of losing. The reliably talented O’Brien ebbs and flows with the father’s stifled humiliation and flaring rage, startling us as a child might be with his sudden peaks of pique.

The play, nearly two hours long and without intermission, doesn’t confine itself to family life. Playwright Shawn takes the story out into the world, as the child Lemon accompanies Aunt Dan to visit friends. Perhaps unnecessarily, the play shows consequences that are more mundane, though as horrific in their small scale, as unwarranted war. Key in these scenes is Melissa Penick’s convincing portrayal of Mindy, who will do anything for money, and Steve Kidd, who skillfully plays two contrasting characters who know her.

At a point when we can especially appreciate the information, Lemon questions the existence of compassion as more than an empty word, lip-service to a social convention. She would probably be baffled to hear that in some Buddhist countries there is the same word for both heart and mind, an assertion of fundamental indivisibility.

Not every sociopathic personality becomes a serial killer. Some lead lives comfortable and inhibited enough to allow for quite amiable cocktail party chatter. They would probably find this chilling play quite amusing.