URI Hillel presents ‘See You Tomorrow,’ a story about family, caregiving, guilt

Grief, says Iris Bahr, comes in waves – whether it is over the loss of a loved one, or when a loved one loses their memory.

It is in a journey, where emotions drift from laughter to tears, where “guilt is everywhere,” where acceptance is illusive.

Iris Bahr, an accomplished actress and comedian, recently brought her award-winning one-woman show, See You Tomorrow, to the University of Rhode Island. It is the story of her own journey, from when her mother suffered a stroke to today, when her mother lives with dementia in a nursing home in Israel.

“Her hell slowly became my hell,” she says.

The performance was sponsored by the University of Rhode Island Hillel, the theater department, health services, and Congregation Beth David of Narragansett.

Performing before an intergenerational audience at URI’s Swan Hall Auditorium, Bahr connected with the audience of nearly a hundred, who during a question-and-answer segment following the 55-minute performance, shared their own stories of journeys like Bahr’s.

Bahr articulated the emotional journey they had undergone.

She began the story during a video call in February 2022. Bahr was in her Los Angeles apartment and her mother in her apartment in Israel, when her mother suffered a stroke during the call. There were those frantic moments as she tried to find someone to call an ambulance for her mother, her trip to Israel within days of the call, and the extremes of hope that her mother would recover and despair to learn the dementia that resulted would only get worse.

We learn early on of her frustrations with her mother, a not so unusual mother-daughter relationship that, at times, Bahr says, proves that “suffocation transcends geographic boundaries.” And, of love, of family that “transcends” frustration.

“Love and guilt,” Bahr says, “are very powerful.”

As the play’s promotional material suggests, this is a “funny and poignant story about family, caregiving, guilt, and what happens when memory and one’s history dissolves in an instant.”

It is a conversation between Bahr and her audience, with a minimal set of a small table and a couple of chairs.

See You Tomorrow is one of a number of one-person award-winning shows that Bahr has written, performed, and produced from the United Nations to the United Kingdom.

Bahr, who now lives in New York, is a magna cum laude graduate of Brown University, where she studied Neuropsychology, is stand-up comic, and has appeared in numerous television shows, including Curb Your Enthusiasm (a recurring role), The Connors, and her cable series, Svetlana.