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LAST EASTER - At the Lucille Lortel Theatre, an MCC Thetre Production
by Bryony Lavery, Directed by Doug Hughes.
Set - Hugh Landwehr, Costumes - Catherine Zuber, Lights - Clifton Taylor
Jeffrey Carlson (Taboo), Veanne Cox (Caroline, or Change) Jeffrey Scott Green
(Breaking the Code), Clea Lewis (Writer's Block) and Florencia Lozano (Where's My
Money?, "One Life to Live")
If I had knows this was by the same playwright as Frozen, I might not have gone. I would have
missed good night in the theatre.
A strange little band of mostly theatre people take off to Lourdes as a last effort to save their
friend from secondary cancer, or at least take her and their minds off her death for a little bit. It’
s a play about what people do when there is death on the appointment calendar. We are not neat
and organized. We do not do things in a calm considered fashion. We are sloppy and funny and
sentimental and inappropriate. And tender to the world around us.
Like Frozen, a lot of this play is exposition. Unlike Frozen, it hangs together. That’s because
the characters are connected to one another. It’s as if at some point all the characters clasp
hands and refuse to let go completely. As if this will prove they are alive.
Veanne Cox leads this group along in an understated fashion. I find her an intriguing performer.
She had the most difficult part in Caroline or Change – playing the white stepmother transplanted
from the North and trying oh, so hard to prove she was not a racial bigot. In this piece she is
the cancer victim and treads the very fine line between sentiment and sadness, between miracle
and morbidity. She has one of the best lines in the play after she dies “My brain couldn’t make a
decision. My body did. It died.”
And in the end, Lavery brings us back to the people left – still hanging on to one another and to
the empty part that was their chum. Still alive. Still in the world. Still tender.
Well done.