Photo Source: Alan Simons
The day started on a sobering, shattering note with Lucas Hnath’s “Death Tax” in the intimate Victor Jory studio space. Lit by designer Brian H. Scott with harsh fluorescent tubes, the play is set in a nursing home and chronicles the ethical conflicts that take place when a rich patient accuses her nurse of trying to kill her. Like John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” Hnath’s incisive script examines the moral questions raised when the issues are muddy. Each of the four characters - Maxine, the elderly woman afraid of dying; Tina, the Haitian nurse engaged in a bitter custody battle for her son; Todd, Tina’s supervisor who is also in love with her; and Maxine’s daughter, desperately in need of her mother’s money—has motives beyond altruism. Hnath has created a fascinating, complex puzzle, strongly staged by director Ken Rus Schmoll, and intensely acted, especially by Quincy Tyler Bernstine as Tina. The only problem is the last scene, which jumps ahead 20 years after the initial action, fails to resolve the story of the most interesting character, Tina. Despite this misstep, “Death Tax” has received some of the hottest buzz of the festival and with some rewriting, could become a popular choice on regional stages.
Playwright-actor Lisa Kron (“Well,” “In the Wake”) followed with much lighter fare. Her “The Veri**on Play,” in which she also plays the lead, uses biting satire to chronicle one of those nightmare struggles with customer service. When Jenni (Kron) is overcharged by her phone company by $150, she thinks it’s a quickly resolved, trivial matter at first. But, after the matter stretches out for months, she descends into a Kafkaesque world of corporate conspiracies and underground counterinsurgencies. Kron works in a healthy amount of righteous outrage, political commentary, and wickedly funny parodies of typical telecommunication foul-ups. At 90 minutes, the play feels a bit overextended—particularly in the climactic chase sequence—and could benefit from some judicious editing. There are surprising musical numbers, featuring snappy original tunes from Jeanine Tesori (“Caroline, or Change”).
Levity continued to be the theme of the day with “Michael von Siebenburg Melts Through the Floorboards” by Greg Kotis (“Urinetown”). The title character is a 500-year-old Austrian count who lures unsuspecting young women to his rent-controlled apartment to slaughter them and consume their flesh. Kotis gets off lots of smart cracks on the current undead craze and features characterizations that go beyond guffaws, but like “The Veri**on Play,” the central idea is established early on and then stretched too far, to two acts in this case. A fast 90 minutes would have served the premise better.
The evening ended with Mona Mansour’s “The Hour of Feeling,” a cutting drama about a Palestinian scholar torn between the glitter of London literary circles and his strife-torn homeland during the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Monsour employs the same family she portrayed in her “Urge for Going,” seen at the Public Theater. Adham and his new wife Abir, 40 years younger than they were in “Urge for Going,” travel from their village near Jerusalem to the British capital, where Adham is set to deliver a lecture on Wordsworth. When war breaks out, the couple must choose between returning to their town, where Adham’s stern mother could be endangered, or remaining in London with the possibility of stability and a fellowship. Mansour carefully details the couple’s push-pull struggle between heritage and ambition. Director Mark Wing-Davey delivers a dazzling production, starkly contrasting the simplicity of the Middle East with the aural and visual assault of 1960s Britain.
After the curtain for “Feeling” fell, cast, crew, and visitors adjourned to a nearby bar for drinks and networking, concluding an exhausting but exciting day of new plays.
