"Last Easter" by Jacques Le Sourd ~ The Journal News 10.08.04
Playwright Bryony Lavery doesn't create characters. She creates types.
The author of last season's Tony-nominated play "Frozen" on Broadway has a new work, titled "Last Easter," at the Off-Broadway Lucille Lortel Theatre. It opened there last night, in a production of the MCC Theater, which is in residence at the Lortel for three years.
The types this time are:
- A gay guy who knows showtunes and has no trouble finding sex, anywhere and anytime;
- A sweetly clueless Jewish-American girl who lives in England;
- A funny alcoholic who is haunted by an old boyfriend who killed himself; and
- The play's center, a woman afflicted with cancer.
These types — which are unfortunately far from being genuine people — are all professionally involved in England's equivalent of the Off-Off-Broadway theater, which brings them together.
This time we can presume that they are, at any rate, original. This may not have been the case with some of the major characters in "Frozen," whom Lavery has been accused of lifting with verbatim quotes from a 1997 profile of a psychiatrist in The New Yorker magazine. The types in "Frozen" were an American psychiatrist and a British serial killer, together with the mother of a murdered child.
"Last Easter," which has been expertly directed by Doug Hughes to maximize its entertainment value, is never boring. The title refers to two Easters: Act One ("Last Easter") chronicles a hilarious and harrowing trip by the gang of types to the French religious shrine of Lourdes, which produces no miracle. Act Two ("This Easter") tells how they helped their friend to die.
But fear not the emotional content of this play. It has none, because everybody is being so cute about the concept of assisted suicide that you wouldn't know from this play that it's a serious issue. In fact, cancer itself is treated lightly here.
"Don't go there," its victim reassuringly tells us early on. "All this isn't a Big Tragedy." The play, not just the cancer victim at its center, is always being bravely upbeat. "Wit" — the truly memorable play about a cancer death — this definitely isn't.
But all the performances by a top-notch cast are fine, because good actors can really get their fangs into juicy types. Veanne Cox ("Caroline, or Change") is June, a lighting designer, who has had breast cancer and is now afflicted with incurable "secondary cancer." In the first act she wears a wig, and in the second she is bald but wears a bandanna. June keeps smiling valiantly through her pain, and she persuades her friends to help her die by telling them fake stories that will pluck their heartstrings.
Jeffrey Carlson, who played the teenage gay son in Edward Albee's "The Goat" and one of the more outrageous drag queens in the musical "Taboo," is excellent as Gash, a professional female impersonator who channels Judy Garland and knows all the songs from "Easter Parade," who tells endearingly bad jokes at sad moments, and who never fails to have sex in any town he is in — even Lourdes.
Clea Lewis is charmingly naive as the Jewish prop maker. Clea keeps perfecting her animal masks. "Lourdes," says Leah at the first mention of the place. "Daughter of Madonna?"
Florencia Lozano is also quite funny as Joy, a raging alcoholic actress who first thought is always, "I need a drink!" She is also a part-time Buddhist, and she is followed about by the silent ghost of her dead stagehand boyfriend Howie (Jeffrey Scott Green).
Hugh Landwehr's set is a jumble of backstage clutter, which turns out to be just right for a backstage play that travels: we're never far from the illusion of theater. Lighting designer Clifton Taylor creates a few startling effects, which this time justly call attention to themselves, as the heroine is a lighting designer.
But Lavery's play, unfortunately, leaves us with the lightweight impression that death is only a question of lighting.