Death Comes to Play at BeBe Theatre
It seems The Sublime Theater & Press has something of a knack for unfortunate timing.
About two years ago, I reviewed the company’s Some Notes on Dating During Outbreak, the debut of which had been long-delayed by the actual COVID-19 pandemic. And its current production, Death Comes to Play, had been scheduled to launch last October — days after death visited Western North Carolina in the form of Tropical Storm Helene.
Although Death happens to begin on a dark and stormy night, playwright and Sublime Theater artistic director Steven Samuels bills his latest offering as a “high-stakes comic gothic,” not a tragedy. Instead of offering a direct response to recent events, the work takes a more general look at death and the inherent absurdity of how humans grapple with their ultimate ends.
Samuels also directs the production and plays its central role: the curmudgeonly, cadaverously bald-shaven Vincent Fuchs, marking his 75th birthday at home with his adult son, Sean Bonardo (Alex McDonald Villarreal). Sean has invited his own friends over for a game night to celebrate his father, but the weather seemingly keeps all but Grace Cecil (Olivia Stuller) from making it to Fuchs’ remote estate.
Vincent may be confined to an old-fashioned wooden wheelchair, but Samuels does an excellent job establishing the character as a domineering presence. He shamelessly flirts with Grace — intimating that she might be richly rewarded for her companionship in his will after his demise — and berates Sean for wasting his life on board games, their boxes piled in towering stacks on one side of Kayren McKnight’s otherwise uncluttered Bebe Theatre set. Even when taking a phone call from an off-stage cousin, Vincent uses his side of the conversation to snipe at his long-suffering son.
As a writer, Samuels’ dialogue hints at intriguing complexity in Vincent’s conversational partners, which Villarreal and Stuller work to highlight in the appropriate places. Grace shows anxiety driven by past failures in romantic partnerships, while Sean’s obsession with games appears to be a coping mechanism for childhood trauma. Their first act’s discussions with Vincent tease these threads in darkly comic ways, the tensions gradually evolving as the cast drinks from a giant bottle of champagne.
But that evolution skips a beat with the unexpected arrival of Sarah Serkin (Laura Tratnik), who claims to be the plus-one of another guest. It quickly becomes apparent — and should come as no surprise, given the play’s title — that the new visitor isn’t just one more player at the game night. Sarah shatters the old man’s dominance of the conversation, and when she’s literally unmasked as Death itself, the action jumps into much higher-concept territory.
Perhaps this is inevitable given the premise, but Samuels’ writing loses some comic luster as his characters wrestle directly with Death. There are hilarious moments — Sean’s patiently pained explanation of a complicated board game’s rules, for example, or Tratnik’s physically comedic portrayal of Death experiencing biological urges. Yet with its more fantastical premise, the second act overall feels less personal, less clever, and more rushed in its characterization.
In announcing the play, Samuels said it was important to him to keep the runtime with intermission at under 90 minutes, and the production nails that target. But I found myself wanting either a longer performance, where the characters could fully explore their hinted-at past lives, or a one-act version that leapt into the allegorical encounter with Death more quickly. Then again, as Sarah reminds the audience at the ending, Death doesn’t usually operate on the timeline we’d prefer.
Death Comes to Play runs through Saturday, May 3, at the BeBe Theatre in downtown Asheville. Tickets and more information are available at this link.
(Photo courtesy of Sublime Theater & Press)
