"Last Easter" by Michael Kuchwara ~ New York Newsday 10.07.04
Comedy nearly crowds out the tragedy in "Last Easter," Bryony Lavery's fitful tale of a woman dying of cancer and her friends' joke-a-minute attempts to help her cope with the disease.
Yet what proves more fatal to the play, which MCC Theater opened Thursday off-Broadway, is its superficially drawn characters, people who are types rather than flesh and blood.
Poor June, an English lighting designer, has breast cancer, and the prognosis is not good. Yet over the course of two acts, we don't learn much more about her. It's hard to work up much sympathy for a woman we never really get to know, despite Veanne Cox's appealing performance.
June, defined by her illness, seems to be there just for her best chums to react to. And even they are cliches.
The most obvious is the tart-tongued drag queen, with a fondness for Judy Garland and bad puns. He is expertly played by Jeffrey Carlson, a veteran of such roles after having played a similar extravagant part in last season's Boy George musical "Taboo."
Then there's the squeaky American girl (Clea Lewis), a mousy, often bewildered creature at odds with British culture.
A raucous, good-time girl (Florencia Lozano) completes the trio. She's an alcoholic with a dead boy friend (Jeffrey Scott Green). He keeps silently reappearing throughout the play, primarily to move props around a marvelously cluttered stage that set designer Hugh Landwehr has filled with bric-a-brac.
Director Doug Hughes' production is flashy and effective. The action moves quickly, especially after the threesome decide to take the non-religious June to Lourdes for a possible miracle cure.
"The only thing I find religion's got going for it is the lighting," sniffs June, and the prospects of a trip to the holy shrine fills her with apprehension.
"They're going to take me to Lourdes and I'm going to be miraculously cured of secondary cancer from which no one recovers by a phenomenon celebrated by a religion I don't believe in," she says. And then embarks on the journey.
To its credit, "Last Easter" never turns sticky and sentimental. Lavery, author of last season's Tony-nominated "Frozen" (the subject recently of a plagiarism charge), has a quip for every other moment in the play, even as the evening approaches its inevitable conclusion. Yet there should be something more to this drama than the dark laughter these jokes provide.