Leila Buck telling Teta’s stories. Photo: T. Chase Meacham

Almost everyone knows what it’s like to realize how much wisdom a grandparent has to offer. For many, that discovery is followed by regret.

But when Leila Buck had that universal epiphany, she instead turned it into a piece of art: her interactive performance piece Hkeelee (Talk to Me), which is showing at the Arena Stage’s Mead Center for American Theater this weekend.

Buck, whose Lebanese mother served as a diplomat for the U.S., visited her grandmother Teta in D.C. frequently as a child and young adult, splitting her time between the United States and the Middle East. As Buck grew older, she gradually realized how much Teta had experienced, and how little Buck had thought to ask about any of it. Teta and her husband fled their Beirut home for Bethesda in 1975, during the war in Lebanon. Making a life in the U.S. with no preparation proved a challenge.

Around a decade ago, Buck started to notice her grandmother forgetting things. Eventually she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. It was then that Buck decided to make a habit of taking out her recorder and leaving it on the table whenever she chatted with her grandmother.

“She’s just an incredible, warm and loving and generous, funny and fun personality. Her ability to find the joy and the play and the humor and the lightness in the hardest times, even through her own loss of memory and registering that, was so inspiring to me,” Buck said. “I felt that it might be also inspiring to others.”

Buck already had experience translating her family’s memories into her work, having interviewed her parents for a project that turned into her first solo show in the late ’90s. She made sure to get her grandmother’s permission and told her upfront that what she said might end up onstage. “Only the best parts!” Teta would respond. “I could tell it lit her up to know that she could pass along some stories,” Buck says.

In crafting the piece, Buck realized that it wouldn’t be possible or desirable to structure the narrative in a linear fashion. Teta’s stories came piecemeal, and Buck acknowledges there’s still plenty she doesn’t know.

“There are also things that are beyond words and beyond stories, that are about the essence of her that I came to know,” Buck says. “That for me has been the journey of this play.”

Buck thinks Teta’s story has particular relevance in today’s American political climate, given the debate over the role of immigrants in a nation founded by them. Teta found a way to grow and adapt to her environment, but it wasn’t easy and not everyone has that opportunity.

The show itself has been evolving since Buck started performing it years ago. This weekend, it’ll consist of monologues delivered by Buck as both herself and her grandmother, as well as an interactive element that incorporates what Buck describes as “structured improvisation.” She knows the stories she’ll tell and the order in which she’ll tell them. But the interactions with the audience, naturally, can’t be predetermined.

“She thrived on people. She loved people, she loved to engage with people,” Buck said. “That’s a big part of what I what I wanted to share with people.”

The character of Buck’s grandmother might ask the audience to remind her of something she said earlier, ask direct questions about others’ backgrounds, teach a song or even hand out food. Audience participation is strictly voluntary, Buck says, but it’s a key part of the performance.

Hkeelee (Talk to Me) closes out this year’s Voices festival from Mosaic Theater Company of DC, whose artistic director, Ari Roth, calls Buck “a really vital and necessary female voice” in a press release. Ross first worked with Buck on an acting role roughly a decade ago, he says. “We’re really grateful to be nurturing this brand new work and helping it move from one stage of completion to a more refined place.”

As the piece continues to develop, Buck hopes to eventually comb through every last recording of her grandmother’s. She expects the rehearsal process for this iteration of the performance to inform future versions, and elements like the set and the order of events aren’t set in stone for a final product. The more she does it, the easier it gets, she says.

The real Teta got to see an early version of Buck’s creation before she died last March. Buck says she was consistently thrilled at the idea of a performance based on her life.

“I have a feeling she’ll be there in spirit,” Buck says. “I fully believe that part of people’s response to this piece is that she helps me out whenever I do it.”

Buck hopes audiences identify with Teta’s narrative and connects it to someone they love.

“You can share the challenges,” Buck says, “but ultimately you can share the resilience and the healing that comes from being able to reinvent yourself, being able to carry parts of someone you live in you, and to share them with others.”

Hkeelee (Talk to Me) from Mosaic Theater at Arena Stage, has a limited-run engagement this weekend only. Tickets are available online.