| Documentary theatre. It's too long and far too slow but so is dying sometimes which is, perhaps, partly the point of this play about a woman in at home hospice care. Verisimilitude without imagination or poetry can be tedious. Thorne, a young playwright, seems eager to get the details right, but she hasn't been able to transform quotidian experience into something compelling. Worse, the family she's writing about is consumed by varieties of depthless depression which just adds to the alienation; everyone here is unselfconsciously miserable. Lois Smith, however, is some kind of wonder and to the extent that the play aims to be feelingful about what it's like--and what it means--to, paradoxically, rage against and welcome the dying of the light, she provides it. But otherwise the play is stalled from the start. |
