The past doesn’t pay your debts.

Overview: A darkly funny family drama set inside a senior care residence, Visits with Blanche Devereaux explores addiction, memory, and the stories families tell themselves to survive.

Set in the late 1990s, the play centers on a fractured family navigating dementia, long-held resentment, and the question of what—if anything—is truly “owed” between parents and children.

Balancing biting comedy with emotional volatility, the piece offers a complex central role in Mick: a man both destructive and deeply human, whose actions force those around him to confront uncomfortable truths about love, responsibility, and what is owed.

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Synopsis: 1997. A senior care residence in Spokane, Washington.

Mick, 58, broke, and slipping back into addiction, returns to visit his mother, now deep in dementia. She no longer knows him. Most days, she believes she’s Blanche Devereaux.

But Mick knows exactly who to blame for his life: his stepfather, Keith—a self-made grocery magnate who married his mother and, in Mick’s mind, took everything with her.

As Mick’s financial desperation closes in, he seizes on a piece of information that could bring Keith down and begins to push for what he believes he’s owed.

His brother Ben tries to hold the line as the family is pulled into a volatile collision of memory, resentment, and entitlement: where the past is contested, and the cost of forcing the truth may be everything.

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Context: Visits with Blanche Devereaux grew out of an interest in how families rewrite their own histories...especially when memory itself becomes unreliable.

As Alzheimer’s has become an increasingly visible and defining force in American life, much of its recent portrayal onstage has centered on the internal experience of the patient. This play shifts the lens outward, focusing instead on those orbiting the illness: family members navigating caregiving, resentment, dependency, and the quiet recalculations of what is owed.

Set against the specificity of the late 1990s—when both Alzheimer’s and the internet were beginning to reshape how people understood truth and authority—the play explores the uneasy intersection of addiction, caregiving, and inheritance.

At its center is a question without a clean answer: when the past is contested and the present is unstable, who gets to decide what is true…and what is owed?

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Themes: Addiction. Family fracture. Inheritance and entitlement. Memory, identity, and authority.

Cast Size: 5 actors, 2F / 2M / 1 non-specific.

Production Considerations: Approx. 75–90 minutes. Continuous run (intermission optional). Single set.