Berkeley Rep's 2025-26 season opened this week with playwright Jake Brasch's semi-autobiographical play The Reservoir, which is an unconventional, mostly unsentimental examination of the parallels between severe alcoholism and dementia.

The piece centers on Josh (Ben Hirschhorn), a man in his early 20s who is in all ways but physically, at sea. We meet him as he's just relapsed into alcoholism after his first real taste of sobriety, getting kicked out of a sober house where he had landed after dropping out of NYU. He's in his hometown in Colorado. His mom (Brenda Withers) has given up trying to take responsibility and doesn't want him under her roof — though she relents when the alternative is homelessness. And, he finds, after a couple of years lost to a drunken haze, that his favorite grandmother has dementia, and he sets about trying to "save" his three other living grandparents from a similar fate.

Ben Hirschhorn (back L-R): Barbara Kingsley, Pamela Reed, Michael Cullen, and Peter Van Wagner in Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir, performing at Berkeley Repertory Theatre now through October 12, 2025. Photo by Kevin Berne

As that favorite Nana, Irene, veteran actress Barbara Kingsley shines, able to toggle seamlessly between the vibrant, loving, lucid version of the character in flashback, and the slumped, tragically frozen person she's become — with only brief flashes of her former self, like when she suddenly launches into a Christmas carol and sings the entire thing.

As grandfathers Hank and Shrimpy, Michael Cullen and Peter Van Wagner depict two distinct fates of older men — one sullen, dutiful, but inwardly angry and the other still curious and voracious for life.

The emotional center of the play turns out to be Bev — played by the talented and eminently watchable Pamela Reed, who last graced the Berkeley Rep stage in 2020's Becky Nurse of Salem. From Josh's Jewish side (his father's mother), Bev becomes Josh's greatest champion and comfort during his year at home. After another relapse, Josh learns that Bev, too, was a severe alcoholic, and she starts taking him to AA meetings, and seeing him every day through his recovery. The sweetness of that relationship, and Bev's pragmatic, agnostic worldview, are exactly what Josh needs to keep moving forward.

Pamela Reed and Ben Hirschhorn in 'The Reservoir' at Berkeley Rep. Photo by Kevin Berne

As Josh, Hirschhorn gives a stellar, unimpeachable performance, carrying this show through two acts, many difficult emotional highs and lows, and thousands upon thousands of words. Josh's compassion and love for his grandparents, and his own utter confusion ring true throughout, and Hirschhorn catches every subtle emotional beat.

While The Reservoir can veer into the self-indulgent, heavy as it is with monologues from a young person who has just a tenuous grasp on life and how to live it, it still sparkles with moments of wisdom and flashes of revelation, often coming from the voices of the older, wiser characters. One of the play's loveliest and most moving moments comes in Act 1, as Josh encounters his Nana Irene in a semi-lucid dream, and she is suddenly herself again. As she speaks of the tragedy of her own brain giving out long before "that body," it's impossible not to grieve with her.

The direction by Mike Donahue keeps the show, with its minimalist set consisting mostly of just five chairs, dynamic and propulsive.

The Reservoir succeeds, largely through humor, in pulling off a delicate balancing act between overwrought self-reflection and unsentimental modernism which are both pitfalls of the autobiographical play genre. And where it lands is someplace genuinely affecting, with the simplest message to love your family while you can, and listen to your elders, but never mistake them for oracles.

'The Reservoir' plays through October 12. Find tickets here.