Death Play

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Circle X at Atwater Village Theatre
Through April 23

Death Play dramatizes solo writer/performer Lisa Dring’s experience of loss following the deaths of her parents and grandmother.

Directed by Jessica Hanna, the production comes attractively packaged with a suitably spectral set and lighting design by Kirk Wilson and subtle accompanying sound by Jeff Gardner. But the performance, and to a lesser extent the writing, leave much to be desired.

Dring lost all three of these figures in her life (her father, though an influence, she barely knew) when she was in her 20s. Her non-chronological narrative is a miscellaneous amalgam of recollections, anecdotes and poems, interspersed with shrieks, wails and other undefinable sounds that are meant to convey the pain and confusion wrought by losing someone significant in one’s life.

The objective of such a performance should be to help establish a bond of common humanity with the audience. After all, so many of us (including yours truly) know what it’s like to sit at the bedside of a dying loved one — more, to make the heartbreaking choice to let them go.

But Dring’s physical and verbal carryings-on are so wildly un-tempered and unpolished, and her outlook so in-your-face narcissistic, that her show is a turnoff.

One outstandingly offensive irritant is the writer’s use of the word “crone” when speaking of her grandmother, and the ugly mimicry she employs to represent this relative on stage. I think the appellation is used as part of a broader effort to communicate the experience of being a woman at all stages of life (“I’m a maiden, she’s a crone,” Drink declares at one point), but its repetition time and again is fiercely grating nonetheless.

A few of the writing passages have a nice flow to them, and Dring’s celebration of her (half) Asian heritage is also a positive, among a slew of negatives.

Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave, Atwater; Performances rotate Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7 p.m.; special performance Mon., April 11, 7 p.m.; through April 23. www.circlextheatre.org. Running time: One hour, five minutes with no intermission.