“Shoot Me When …” by Ruben Grijalva won the 2022 Will Glickman Award for best new play to premiere in the Bay Area last year, a panel of prominent Bay Area theater critics announced Wednesday, March 30.
The show, which was produced by San Francisco Playhouse as an on-demand video stream, centers on a family whose aging matriarch, Jackie, is losing her memory. The title comes from a bit of gallows humor that’s actually deadly serious. Jackie has long told her daughters, Gabrielle and Ariel, to shoot her before her brain deteriorates so much that, say, she can’t go to the bathroom by herself any longer. Now the daughters feel she’s nearing that point, but Jackie’s memory is so bad she has a hard time remembering that she gave them that instruction.
“Shoot Me When …” features one-of-a-kind yet instantly relatable characters and razor-sharp dialogue that’s somehow uproarious and heartrending at once. Its devastating conclusion indicts our country’s scant good options for those suffering memory loss.
In a playwright’s statement accompanying the play’s premiere, Grijalva compared memory loss to the Ship of Theseus: At what point is the deteriorating brain no longer the same brain?
“My aim is not to advocate that anyone make such a fraught choice, but to ask whether we should each be able to make it for ourselves,” he wrote. “And, if so, to which self should the choice belong? If my future self is not meaningfully me — if the ship isn’t the same ship — what do I owe that new person?”
Grijalva, who is based in San Francisco, also makes films and virtual experiences. His previous plays include“Anna Considers Mars”and “Value Over Replacement,” and he has worked with PianoFight and PlayGround in addition to San Francisco Playhouse.
Named after the Tony Award-nominated San Francisco playwright and screenwriter who died in 1983, the Will Glickman Award is one of the highest honors in Bay Area theater. Nonprofit Theatre Bay Area, which administers the prize and its $4,000 purse, plans to honor Grijalva at its annual conference on Monday, April 4.
The Glickman Committee comprises Lily Janiak of The Chronicle, David John Chávez and Karen D’Souza of the Mercury News, Nicole Gluckstern of KQED, Sam Hurwitt of Bay Area News Group and the Marin Independent Journal, and Jean Schiffman of the San Francisco Examiner.