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Alzheimer's disease and dementia seem to be supplanting dysfunctional families as the hot topic for plays and films. Julianne Moore took home an Academy Award two years ago for her portrayal of a brilliant woman losing her way in "Still Alice"; "Alive Inside," a touching documentary on the amazing ability of music to revitalize dementia patients, won the Audience Award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Now Utah Repertory Theatre is staging the regional premiere of Sharr White's "The Other Place," whose Off-Broadway run earned Laurie Metcalf an Obie Award. Like Alice, Juliana, the play's central character, is a bright woman with a successful career. She has invented and is marketing Identamyl, a drug that ironically improves brain function for dementia sufferers. During a presentation at a medical conference, she has "an incident" that makes her believe she has a brain tumor, a type of cancer that runs in her family. The incident is triggered by the annoying appearance in the audience of a young woman in a yellow bikini, whose surprising identity is revealed later in the play.

"The Other Place" dramatically counterpoints pieces of her presentation against scenes with a doctor and Juliana's husband, Ian, also a doctor, as they attempt to diagnose what's wrong with her.

"You can't just let go of the past," Juliana tells us, and her past continually invades her present. Twelve years earlier, Juliana and Ian's teenage daughter, Laurel, ran away after a fight over her relationship with Juliana's much older lab assistant. This loss haunts Juliana, but she tells Ian she has now reconnected with Laurel.

A pleasanter presence from the past is "the other place" of the title, a vacation house on Cape Cod that Juliana associates with happier times with her family.

The play adopts an interesting vantage point: Like "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" and Julie Jensen's recent "Mockingbird," it puts us into Juliana's head so we experience the disorientation she is feeling. This becomes problematic. It takes us a while to figure out that Juliana is an unreliable narrator, and deciphering the clues to determine what's real and what isn't becomes distracting and interrupts our emotional involvement with the character. Sometimes White also seems to heighten the confusion to manipulate the audience.

The major reason to see "The Other Place" is Stephanie Howell's knockout performance as Juliana. From the confident command and devastatingly witty comments of her conference presentation to the alternating outrage and confusion she feels when she becomes aware she is not being rational to the dazed look and repeated movements of someone who has retreated into herself, Howell is totally in touch with Juliana's character. Eric Cadora ably orchestrates Ian's emotional highs and lows as he struggles to cope with his wife's mental disintegration. Andrea Peterson and JayC Stoddard do a nice job portraying the play's other characters. Peterson especially makes a poignant transition from anger and frustration to compassion as the young woman Juliana mistakes for Laurel when she returns to the other place.

Director Jason Bowcutt wisely keys the play's pacing to Juliana's calmer and more frenetic moments so it, too, reflects her volatile swings. Bobby Cody's lighting subtly shifts to reveal time, place and mood changes. However, it's hard to figure out what the wooden-slatted walls of Cara Pomeroy's set are supposed to suggest. A box, perhaps, that Juliana is trapped in?

Dementia is a devastating disease, and Howell's mesmerizing performance captures the panic that results when you feel you are losing control of your life. —

'The Other Place'

Stephanie Howell's multidimensional performance more than compensates for the unevenness of this portrait of a woman sinking into dementia.

When • Reviewed Feb. 17; plays Fridays and Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. through March 4, with an additional show on Sunday, Feb.26, at 3 p.m.

Where • Sorenson Unity Center, 1383 S. 900 West, Salt Lake City

Tickets • $20; $17 for students and seniors; utahrep.org; contains adult language and situations

Running time • 80 minutes (no intermission)