Ellen Locy, Nicole Case, and Beth Bontley are siblings dealing with bereavement in 'The Memory of Water.'

The Memory of Water Thru Apr 14 at Circle Theatre, 230 W 4th St, FW $10-20, 817-877-3040

We often distance ourselves from those to whom we should be closest. Embarrassment, jealousy, and the familiarity-breeding-contempt thing cause many to escape, or avoid, their family ties. Like the song says, though, you can't escape the ties that bind. Like it or not, most of us occasionally have to deal with our families, and few things force related strangers to deal with one another like a death in the family.

In The Memory of Water, a mother's death brings together three sisters who, having little in common, are less than thrilled with the prospect of sharing a week in their childhood home. Mary (Ellen Locy) is a somewhat haughty doctor and the family golden child. At least, she appears that way initially; later developments show her equally capable of sadness and bad choices. Teresa (Beth Bontley) is married to Frank (Andy Gwyn), whom she met through the personals, or maybe an internet chat room, and with whom she owns a health-food store. Catherine (Nicole Case), the youngest, is apparently jobless, spending her life shopping, drugging, attending parties, and chasing an endless stream of men. When Teresa asks Catherine, who claims to be broke, how she could buy so many new clothes, Catherine replies, "Don't be silly. Broke doesn't mean you can't buy things." The mother in question, Vi (Kristina Baker), suffered a long, unpleasant bout of Alzheimer's before dying. Being the sole local daughter means Teresa got to care for her mother and watch her die. This causes later friction; Teresa tells the others they get the easy part of the funeral, not the hard part of dealing with daily disease and waiting out death.

The sisters, in line with their personalities, deal with their mother's death differently. Teresa stays focused and busy micromanaging funeral details and is less than pleased by the others' lack of interest or assistance in such things. She employs busywork and nit-picking attention to detail as a defense against real-world problems, her relationship with her mother, and her dead marriage. Catherine, Teresa's polar opposite, smokes pot, goofs off, offers little help or comfort to anyone, and seems selfish and lost. Mary deals by ignoring; her mother's death and the trip home is an inconvenience. Early on, she treats the trip as a chance to read up on medical literature relating to one of her patients.

The play's action occurs solely in the bedroom of Vi's English seaside home where the sisters grew up. Mary, much to her chagrin, gets stuck in her mother's room, which the others barge into constantly. The girls fight, reminisce, and share the long uncomfortable silences of people who no longer really know one another. Mary gets it for being the perfect one who could do no wrong in their parents eyes, Catherine gets it for being able to do no right, and Teresa gets it for having a stick up her ass and so on. All three practice selective memory, always remembering what puts them in the best light. No surprise that the sisters' versions of the same events rarely jibe. They complain about their mother's shortcomings. Occasionally, they realize she is dead forever and cry. Vi's ghost haunts Mary in dreams, telling her to concentrate on the things she did have, not the things she lacked. She reminds Mary, as both share similar gestures, that no matter how far people run, most have more in common with their family than they care to admit. In another slightly creepy moment, the girls take a group photo. The lights blink off and on with Vi's ghost standing by the girls.

Throughout the play, water symbolizes life and death, among other things. The ocean, which erodes the shore, inches closer to the family house every year, prompting several mentions of the house's eventual death at the sea's hands. There is some scientific mumbling about water having memory or retaining traces of memory or previous experiences like an erased cassette tape. Or something. The water motif hardly matters, truth be told, as the play works fine without it. Divining the deep symbolism of various water references is simply trivial pursuit.

Most of The Memory of Water works. The sisters' arguments over old family wounds, augmented by grudging love and resigned acceptance, play realistically. Teresa and Frank are believable as a married couple who, having run out of things to say, live separate lives under the same roof. Yet Mary's relationship with her boyfriend, Mike -- whose wife is supposedly dying, though not really, because Mike just can't decide which one to pick -- seems pat and lifted from a romance novel.

The play is hardly as grave and depressing as it sounds. Quite a bit of English humor sneaks in. Most of the jokes are dark, gallows humor. References to Vi's hair and skin cells being in her bed where Mary is sleeping join remembrances of ringing cell phones at the funeral of the girls' father. One sister wonders if they pack dead babies in bubble wrap so they don't rattle about the coffin. When Teresa phones Mary with news of their mother's death, the conversation begins, "Guess what."

Teresa dumbfounds her sisters by having Vi's body delivered to the house to spend a last night home before the funeral. Seeing the casket brings it all home to the sisters -- and points out how, when faced with death, we focus on small, insignificant things. The girls wonder how their mother could possibly fit in such a small coffin. Earlier Teresa tells Mary how, upon hearing Vi had died, she accidentally wore mismatched shoes to the hospital and couldn't stop laughing over it once she realized. Snow keeps the funeral workers from picking up Vi on the day of her funeral, so it falls to Mike and Frank to cart her out of the house in a wonderful bit of physical humor.

The Memory of Water isn't without fault, but its strengths generally outweigh any weaknesses. The actors perform quite well. Nonetheless, the three girls never seem totally believable as sisters. Although certain epiphanies arise, it is unclear whether the three will alter their behavior in any significant manner. Nor do they seem to grow any closer; it appears that the three will have as little to do with one another after the story has ended as they did before. You won't feel the need to run home and hug your family afterwards.