No Longer the Rock of the World
By Beau O’Reilly
Carol (KellyAnn Corcoran), the grieving widow of a performance artist, confronts her dead husband’s brother, Charles (Guy Massey) on the day of the funeral — a day she has spent curled up in the fetal position listening to the music the dead Walter composed for Elsie, a singer who shared Walter’s interest in “two-chord structures.” The raw minimalism of the songs, performed live by pianist Julian Berke and singer Jenny Magnus (who alternates with Sofie Senard), enhances the bipolar emotional timbre of the play, particularly in the lyric “Muddy when it rains, and dusty when it don’t.
There are faint echoes of Lanford Wilson’s “Burn This” in the story. The wounded but vinegary duo deliver verbal sticks of the shiv as they try to unravel the mystery behind the man neither of them fully understood. Corcoran and Massey work the postage-stamp space with spare but effective physical grace, drawing us into their characters’ divergent lives.
Dead to the World
Kate Teichman crosses genders to play a male dishwasher, caught up in an urban landscape where mundane annoyances (the woman down the hall who complains about the music) start taking on nightmare overtones. Ex-lovers (one with “blue veins jumping and beautiful, like a heavenly Etch A Sketch”), sad-eyed women on the bus and a host of other fleeting presences flicker through the story, delivered by the owlish Teichman with a febrile intensity and mordant wit reminiscent of the narrator in Dostoevski’s “Notes from Underground
But “Dead to the World” is the real knock-out punch… It’s one of the most haunting and watchable performances I’ve seen in a long time.