It’s likely rare to see the words “comedy” and “9/11” in the same story. . Even as we round 24 years since that paradigm-pulverizing tragedy, its pall on the national psyche endures.
But such is the rub of “End Days,” playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer’s 2008 comedy that is now in its South Carolina premiere. A new production by The Village Repertory Co., directed by Keely Enright, is on stage at Threshold Repertory Theatre through Aug. 30.
This tender-hearted, off-kilter play–which brings together a born-again mother, morosely depressed father and their emo teenaged daughter with a figment of a Jesus and an Elvis impersonator–gently and eccentrically tugs at those seemingly disparate bents, which in this production sidle up to one another like the celebrated masks atop a performance hall that alternately weep and smile.
It goes like this: Arthur and Sylvia Stein (actors Aaron Hancock and Tara Holwegner) have taken leave of cosmopolitan life in Manhattan for a cookie-cutter condo in some seemingly random Midwestern town, with their none-too-pleased, eyeliner-heavy daughter Rachel (Ren Mummert) in tow.
The moving boxes remain in the basement of the unadorned, markedly unexceptional abode the Stein family now calls her. Rather than trained on the travails of her 16-year-old daughter, Sylvia is focused on her constant companion, Jesus. Throughout the play, the bearded, robed Messiah convivially shadows her as she makes the rounds at malls and such warning that the Rapture is nigh.
But he’s not nearly as much of a shadowy presence as Arthur, who’s been running on fumes in the aftermath of the events of 9/11. Bug-eyed all night and comatose all day, he slouches abjectly around the kitchen table in a perennial pair of putrid flannel pajamas.
If Rachel’s plight weren’t dire enough with those two, she has somehow inspired the goofy gaze of an oddball classmate, Nelson Steinberg, a bully magnet seated far too proximate in her classes, who also lives near the Steins in a near identical condo.
A guitar-strumming, physics-spouting geek, Nelson sports the same Elvis costume to school every day while waxing rhapsodic about Stephen Hawking, portrayed by Kyle Downs. Like Jesus, who is also played by Downs, he makes his own appearance in the play, zipping in on occasion to offer unsolicited counsel to Rachel.
So what’s a rogue’s gallery of four souls to do? When Sylvia nurses a notion that the Rapture is a-coming, they all wait it out with her, biding the time with a few rounds of chess and some Reuben sandwiches.
Along the way, we are cajoled by the work’s quirks and smirks to gently get to the heart of the malaise that besieges each of them, whether they find a salve in saviors, science or sleep. After all, who among us isn’t clinging to something to make it through a world undone?
The play gets an assist by energized performances, with Ren Mummert as Rachel serving as the play’s emotional core, and Troy Butler setting the comic tone. While the black-clad, eyelinered teen may read emo, in this production, it’s her mother, as portrayed by Tara Holwegner, who unleashes onslaughts of drama, tempered by the Daddy downer aspect ably inhabited by Aaron Hancock.
This production amps it to 11 pretty early on, both in volume and intensity, leaving themselves nowhere to go when the going gets antic. Some calibration would remedy that so all don’t over-emote at the end of the day, or end days, as the case may be. It might also make way for more mitigation between the comedy and tragedy, which must bridge the chasm between Elvis and terrorism, after all.
IF YOU WANT TO GO: Shows are Aug. 22, 23, 24, 29 and 30 at various times at Threshold Repertory Theatre, 84 Society St., Charleston. Tickets from $27.25. More: bit.ly/EndDaysVillageRep
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(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
