Playwright: William J. Norris
At: TinFish Productions at the Victory Gardens Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln
Phone: 773-871-3000; $15-$20
Runs through: July 29
BY MARY SHEN BARNIDGE
Not long into our story, we guess what's happening and, by intermission, we know who it's happening to. But even after the denouement becomes manifest, it's not over. When the precepts of classical tragedy demand that our hero undergo peripeteia—the singular moment when all is revealed, without which his stay in the afterlife will be forever uneasy—final moments are very important.
Dan is not what we expect of a tragic hero when we meet him. He is a middle-aged retired policeman seated in an airy and tastefully-decorated sunroom and enjoying a bottle of beer—the sole interruption to his tranquillity being an occasional phone call from a hospital apprising him of some unnamed person's condition. But then his ex-wife, 'fire-breather' Molly, arrives demanding a confrontation, her candor no less abrasive than when they were married. During their subsequent bouts of nostalgic reminiscing and furious bickering—both conducted in the no-holds-barred manner of adversaries at once intimately familiar with the others' weaknesses, but too loyal in their affections to strike for the jugular—long-buried grievances are exhumed while the future looms just behind the mysterious illumination obscuring the view outside the windows.
Verifiable descriptions of the architecture at the Grim Reaper's dispatch office being unavailable, playwright William J. Norris' vision of the connecting passageway between this world and the next as an indoor-outdoor vestibule is as accurate any in the literary genre beginning, in the English language, with Everyman and supplying inspiration for popular movies and television series to this day. What Before I Wake shares with its predecessors is its injunction that every person, before shuffling off this mortal coil, make his peace with conflicts left unresolved: that he forgive former enemies, or, at the least, abandon thoughts of revenge. And if truth still proves elusive, to choose a plausible possibility.
Exactly where the truth lies is sometimes difficult to discern in this TinFish Productions revival of the play premiering over ten years ago, its two-character structure rendering references to offstage personnel—children, siblings, friends, other wives—confusing at times. Under the incisive direction of Mark Rita, however, Tom Viskocil and Lorraine Freund never falter as they walk us through a fantasy as universally disquieting as it is inevitable, their command of their material providing comforting assurance of a satisfying end to all troubled journeys