Anne Scurria and Susannah Flood rehearse a tender moment in Trinity Rep’s production of Memory House.

The Providence Journal / Sandor Bodo

In Memory House, the next offering from Trinity Rep, Anne Scurria plays a divorced mom spending New Year’s Eve with her adopted daughter, Susannah Flood. But it wasn’t long ago that this on-stage mother-daughter team was real-life teacher and student.

And that has helped with the chemistry in this sweet one-act play by Kathleen Tolan.

“It’s nice,” said Scurria, “because you have to feel something for the other person.”

It was just last year that Flood was a student in the Brown University/Trinity consortium, a three-year graduate program during which Brown playwrights are paired with young Trinity actors and directors. For a couple of years she worked with Scurria, who teaches in the program, in second-year Shakespeare and third-year style, which Flood said is shorthand for “really hard scenes.”

“I didn’t teach her until her second year,” said Scurria, “but I saw her first scenes, and she was good.”

Flood, who was so strong as Emily Webb in last season’s Trinity production of Our Town, hung around for the summer and worked at Brown’s theater program, then went off to New York, where she has been auditioning for parts.

Now she has returned as a pro, with a contract and an apartment at the Regency downtown, dealing with Scurria as a colleague, no longer a teacher.

And how does Scurria feel about that?

“It’s not even on my radar that she was one of my students,” she said. “She’s kind of been out in the world. I’m as hard on her as I would be on anybody.”

Flood has a slightly different take on the relationship. When she was a consortium student she looked at her teachers as surrogate parents, people to look up to and earn their respect.

“Those things are still operating,” Flood said.

Memory House was written about five years ago, when Tolan was in residence at Trinity. Scurria did the very first workshops of the play, before it went off to the Actor’s Theatre of Louisville for its premiere. Now it has come full circle and is back at Trinity as a holiday offering opposite A Christmas Carol.

Last year at this time, the theater paired Christmas Carol with Dublin Carol, Conor McPherson’s dark tale about an alcoholic undertaker visited by his estranged daughter on Christmas Eve.

Memory House promises to be far more upbeat.

“Both actresses have a great sense of humor,” said Curt Columbus, who is directing the show, “and the play is riotously funny if played with women with sharp wits. Both were natural choices to do this.”

The play is simple, running just about 80 minutes. But the banter between Maggie and her teenage daughter, Katia, is crisp, knowing and often touching.

Maggie spends her New Year’s Eve baking a blueberry pie. She is in her mid-50s, was once a dancer, and now works in an office. And she’s depressed about the future.

Enter Kartia, who lives with her college professor dad. She has dropped by to work on a college application that is due that night. Her assignment is to write an essay in the form of a “memory house,” a medieval technique in which a person visualizes a house and stores memories in different rooms, making them easier to retrieve.

But Katia has trouble forming a cohesive picture of her past. She has just fractured memories of her time in a Russian orphanage, and of the time when she was six and Maggie and her ex-husband, Tag, brought her to America..

As Maggie’s pie simmers in the oven, good-natured sparring turns to heated venting, as the two hash out life issues.

Scurria, who actually bakes a pie in a working oven at each performance, said she has found a match in Flood, someone who can really stand up to her and be tough when push comes to shove. Flood, she said, is great at producing “obnoxious teenage behavior.”

“I like people who have an edge,” said Columbus, “someone who can throw down.”

Columbus said he had seen other productions of the play, but had a different take on it when he began reading it with Scurria in mind.

“I had a whole different conception of it with a sharper wit, with a sharper edge and sharper sense of humor.

“The teenage girl has her sense of humor built in. But for the mother you need an actress with some force. I didn’t need someone to play the mother as sweet and delicate, but someone who could be tough.”

While the play centers on whether Katia will finish her college essay on time, it is about more than that.

“It trades in what do we do with the world in the face of things today,” said Columbus, Trinity’s artistic head. “What if you don’t go to college, what if you don’t finish the essay and give it all up.

“And on top of that she is adopted, so there are issues of identity, culture and self.”

The play, said Scurria, is about “what do we remember, how do we reconstruct our lives, what is important.”

It also gets into issues of what constitutes a family, and how families play out their relationships, a hot-button topic around the holidays.

“The holidays are sort of filled with family pressures,” said Columbus, “so watching someone else’s family drama can be a nice antidote.”

But from the director’s perspective, that has made for some “tough sledding.”

“After the hell of working with 77 children in A Christmas Carol, I thought I was picking the easy play for myself,” said Columbus. “But we all find ourselves spent at the end of the day. All the emotions are out there. It’s so real, and the emotions are so big.”

But Columbus sees potential rewards, too.

“It’s going to be such fun,” he said, “to see these two powerful actors kick it.”

Memory House opens Friday in previews and runs though Jan. 6 at Trinity Rep, 201 Washington St., Providence. Tickets range from $20 to $60, with pay-what-you-can tickets available at 7 p.m. for the Nov. 30 performance. Call (401) 351-4242 or visit www.trinityrep.com.

cgray@projo.com