Of all the antagonists the theater has thrown at us over the centuries — the bloodthirsty royals, the cannibal barbers — death is the most formidable, if also the most dramatically inert. How can everyone’s end be anyone’s turning point? If certainty were as exciting as its opposite, “Waiting for Godot” would be “Godot’s Here, On Time as Usual.”
The inevitability of death is thus an almost-inevitable theme for Young Jean Lee, the downtown disrupter lately making an uptown turn. Like a lot of her work, the strangely pleasant “We’re Gonna Die,” which opened on Tuesday night at Second Stage Theater, ought to be untenable. Yet it finds ways to make an unswallowable premise go down easy.
That premise is nothing more or less than the title indicates; “We’re Gonna Die” is not a trick, a joke or a disguise for something else, but a flat-out memento mori.
What gives its foregone conclusion drama and the possibility of theatricality is the disjuncture between its subject and presentation, which is about as downbeat as a good pop act in a nice local bar. For about an hour, a singer (Janelle McDermoth) tells can-you-top-this stories of the awfulness of life — in one, a friend accidentally claws out her cornea — interspersed with catchy songs with titles like “Lullaby for the Miserable” and “Horrible Things.”
That’s the whole show, so frank in outline you may at first be tempted to sift through its simplicity for something more complex. I spent a good deal of time wondering whether the originating idea — Lee has said that the show arose, after her father’s death, as a way of seeking and offering comfort — had somehow refluxed into a satire of its own mechanics. Lee’s lyrics are so literally deadpan (“You’ll hold my hand until I’m dead”) that the sweet and peppy tunes (by Lee and Tim Simmonds and John-Michael Lyles) seem to be spoofing them, or the other way around.
But as conceptually ornate as Lee’s other works may be — including “Straight White Men,” which recently ran on Broadway — “We’re Gonna Die” is totally direct and sincere. That doesn’t mean it’s sentimental; the lyrics keep things dry and so does the deliciously matter-of-fact performance by McDermoth, who sounds fantastic accompanied by a five-person band that eventually helps turn the wake into a party. As de facto host, McDermoth makes deflationary lines like “What makes you so special?” feel like warm invitations.
Of necessity, it’s a low-key party. The director and choreographer, Raja Feather Kelly, takes his staging cues from the idea built into the lyrics that life can be tolerable despite its ending, if you lower your expectations. On a set by David Zinn that looks like a recording studio crossed with a hospital waiting room, the ensemble moves in patterns that suggest dreamy afternoons rather than late-night raves. (There’s even a slow-drip balloon drop.) Gorgeous light in shifting shades of lilac and goldenrod (by Tuce Yasak) suggests both an arena concert and the natural world of which, like it or not, we are always a part.
Kelly, a choreographer with a reputation for developing contextual movement in Off Broadway shows including “Fairview” and “A Strange Loop,” has done wonders directing “We’re Gonna Die,” which in its first incarnation, at Joe’s Pub in 2011, was a bare-bones cabaret affair. That production, as well as later iterations in 2012 and 2013, featured Lee herself as the singer, a challenge she admits was a horrifying idea, though critics thought she acquitted herself well.
But unlike such earlier Lee plays as “Untitled Feminist Show,” which depend on a certain amount of raw energy to support and set off their complex ideas, the plainer “We’re Gonna Die” benefits from having the most polished production (and best singing) possible. In that, it resembles David Byrne’s “American Utopia,” the beautifully upbeat Broadway songfest about a fallen world and how we might yet survive it.
Lee’s particular daring is in denying that survival option. Still, daring cuts two ways. Many of her plays, she says, are the result of heading directly toward her fears. And though writing what she least wants to write is a better policy than writing what people least want to see, there’s a slightly ambivalent quality to this one, a couching of its subject that becomes the subject instead. So even as the audience joins in the quasi-title tune at the end — halfheartedly, the night I saw it — it is not so much facing the facts of life as comforting itself with a prettified version of them.
That’s clearly part of Lee’s plan: to defang mortality by turning it into a “Hey Jude” singalong at a Beatles tribute concert. But the play also suggests that the trick isn’t so easy. In answer to the central question — “What makes you so special?” — the singer at first answers: “I believe, deep down, with all my heart, that I deserve to be immune not only from loneliness and tragedy, but also from aging, sickness and death.”
Surely I was not the only audience member nodding vigorously in agreement at that point. Which may mean that “We’re Gonna Die” is not for everyone, except to the extent that it is.
We’re Gonna Die
Tickets Through March 22 at the Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; 212-541-4516, 2st.com. Running time: 1 hour.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
