Jake Brasch’s ‘The Reservoir’ – an uplifting riff on addiction and Alzheimer’s

“You know, it’s feast or famine over here,” said queer playwright Jake Brasch, whose comic drama, “The Reservoir,” begins performances at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre on September 5. The Colorado native was speaking with the Bay Area Reporter in a video interview from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, where he was overseeing the premiere of a new piece earlier this month.
Fortunately, they noted, audiences in Scotland were hungry for “Hole!”

“It’s a butt plug musical,” explained Brasch, 33, who clearly lives up to his surname. “Are you ready for this?” he widened his eyes and tossed his luxuriant beyond-shoulder-length tresses.

“It’s a two-person show about a group of Nebraskans whose pastor tells them he had a dream in which God told him that everyone has to wear butt plugs at all times, or they might be sucked into the heavens to burn on the face of the sun. Folks are loving it. It took us a second to find our audience, but then it sort of exploded.”

One critic deemed the musical, which Brasch wrote and performed with frequent collaborator Nadja Leonhard-Hooper, “a gloriously bonkers…show about the dangers of toxic masculinity.”

Another, writing that they had already bought tickets to see it a second time called “Hole!” as “beautifully bizarre” and “so gleefully unhinged it practically redefines theatrical irreverence.”

Loose-jointed insight
While “The Reservoir” can fairly be described as hinged relative to Brasch’s Fringe piece, it similarly reflects his zig-zagging, non-lateral creativity, drawing unlikely, insightful connections between seemingly disparate topics.

“The Reservoir” began as a commission to write a play inspired by scientific ideas. It evolved into a fictionalized autobiographical work about Josh, an alcoholic young writer who, crawling up from rock bottom, returns home to Colorado from New York and reconnects with his grandparents.

“I started out focused on collaborative, devised theater pieces,” explained Brasch, who graduated from the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU/Tisch and the playwriting program at Julliard, describing the influence of that early work’s improvisational nature on his own writing process.

Brasch has also helped support himself by working as a clown at children’s birthday parties in New York, in which there is similar on-the-hoof embroidering around a conceptual kernel.

Improvising survival
The kernel of “The Reservoir” was a scientific concept called cognitive reserve, which is the subject of studies around Alzheimer’s disease.

“The idea,” explained Brasch, “is that someone with Alzheimer’s can build up this reserve so that when they start to experience symptoms, they can improvise around them and be able to increase the time of lucidity they have as the disease continues to develop. And the activities that build this reserve happen to incorporate all of the things that make life worth living: Being curious, eating, well, sleeping well, exercising. When I was doing my research into the science, it made me think that this was an incredibly freeing way to confront the disease.”

Eventually, Brasch began to draw parallels between the mental and emotional states of Alzheimer’s patients with those in the throes of chemical addiction, as he had been just a few years earlier.

“There’s a kind of semi-permeable membrane that allows you to come in and out of reality,” Brasch suggested. “When I moved home to get sober, I did reconnect with my aging grandparents. And having my soupy brain of early recovery at the same time they were slipping into dementia and Alzheimer’s, there was a sense that we were on a parallel plane.”

Shifting perspectives
After taking some down time to wrestle with addiction issues, Brasch said, “I felt like I was falling behind my peers.”

But now, “The Reservoir,” Brasch’s first work to be produced professionally has sent their career into hyperdrive. Over an intense three-month span, “The Reservoir,” is being mounted in three distinct productions across the country.

The world premiere, a collaboration between the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, Alliance Theatre, and the Geffen Playhouse was called “hilarious, heartbreaking, and ultimately hopeful,” by one LA critic.

The Berkeley Rep production will be presented on a thrust stage rather than with the proscenium staging employed in the first mounting. Brasch hopes that having fewer concrete set elements will intensify the sense that the play is taking place in the protagonist’s mind as much as in the literal world.

Yet another director will bring their vision to Brasch’s script in an Off-Broadway production later this fall. Meanwhile, Brasch is working on several more plays and potential television opportunities. The day after closing night in Edinburgh, he flew to California to begin Berkeley rehearsals. The protagonist of this story, it seems, has triumphantly emerged from his hole.

‘The Reservoir,’ Sept. 5–Oct. 12. $25-$135. Berkeley Repertory’s Peet’s Theatre, 2025 Addison St. www.berkeleyrep.org
www.jakebrasch.com