I’ve found it is good to be a live-theater goer, and always go in not knowing what to expect, and leave feeling I should go more.
Live theaters are far from the comforts and distractions of streaming movies and shows at home, and come with the strong power of groups of people gathered with anticipated and focused attention on the action at hand in a physically shared experience.
I’m more rooted in movies and books, and gratefully acknowledge that the live experience is not the clean studio look.
The laughs are louder, the miscues show humanity, and you can really hear a pin-drop in exquisite silence with a full theater of people and stage full of actors, everyone simultaneously affected by the same feelings at the same time.. This is my first review of local performances, and thanks to Gene Marrano for the invitation to view the play.
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The in-house part of funeral arranging and what comes with it is what pastor and playwright David Walton shows us in “Closing Arguments”, a Bear Theater Production now showing at Community High School. As a pastor, Walton knows family dynamics in difficult times more than most, and the true colors often revealed in them. This is familiar ground to anyone who has lost an immediate family member, and a realistic portrayal to those who haven’t, of how the grieving process sometimes begins.
Alice Jane, matriarch of the Dalton clan of the small town of Pikeville, has passed. Her two sisters, middle-aged son and daughter, and college-aged grandchild are brought together in the family home three days before the burial. Going through the things, choosing the deceased clothes for the open-casket and pictures for a board of memories, preparing for the open-casket, are supposed to be a quiet and cathartic and meaningful process, right?
This is not the case for the Daltons, and past indiscretions and failures of the characters themselves take precedence over any attempt to celebrate the life of Alice. The slow boils of the tense environment of dealing with death often lead to outright hollering matches, when Teresa Killen (Camille, daughter) and Lillian Alexander (Lynn) raise their voices with vicious barbs, excellently acted and directed to show the raw flare of deep emotion released all at once.
Alexander’s one-liners and attacks on most everyone in the room are a treat throughout, making her slow breakdown over losing her sister more prescient. The still-partying hippie sister Gracie, played by a very fun Stacey Upton, is also often in her crosshairs and makes for pointed exchanges. “Her brain is crispier than KFC”, is the first of many put-downs about drug-use
Marlon (James Gabello) , still living in Pikeville running the family business offers a stand-in for a voice of reason, but is true-blue on his aim for comfort. Gabello is in most of the scenes, and an excellent escort through these mostly depressing tales of lost time from the past. He questions closure, and is ok with having a crazy streek in the family, all do, and we are all better acknowledging it and moving on.
The granddaughter Felicity, excellently played by Caroline Hancock, is the most vulnerable.
“I’ve come to place where I used to be, with people I used to know and can see it from the outside, and don’t like what I see,” and her tears in the hard realization of lost youth is powerful stuff.