Theatre review: Afterlife: A Ghost Story

"You can’t reckon with me."
--The Ocean
“There’s something about looking at what’s left.”
--Connor

Steve Yockey’s Afterlife: A Ghost Story at New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, MA, has a pitch-perfect first act. The second act is so different as to be almost an entirely separate play.

I loved the first act. Connor (Thomas Piper) and Danielle (Marianna Bassham) are a young married couple, boarding up their beach house before a big storm. We know something is very wrong—Danielle is brittle and strange, Connor desperate to draw her out of her shell but failing on every level. Slowly, we figure out that their three-year-old son has recently drowned—in the very ocean their house overlooks. They’re boarding it up largely because Danielle can’t bear to live there anymore. And as she starts hearing her son’s cries on the wind, we fear she’s losing it altogether.

The production gets the grief exactly right, both in the couple’s tension and their raw emotionality. That’s how deep grief feels—the world seems fantastically remote. You can’t engage on any level with anything meaningful, and yet everything feels raw. Every emotion gets buried out of sight, pushed away, because if one strays and gets to the surface, the fountain of grief will erupt. Danielle holds it together because she’s largely anesthetized herself. Connor, however, wants to reengage with the world; Danielle resists because she knows how much that will hurt. The act is a tug of war between them, and eventually, that fountain of grief and anger does erupt, just as the storm hits.

Oh, but then. The second act.

For the second act, the carefully constructed realism disappears (both literally and figuratively, as the house set is rolled back). The stage is divided into three playing areas, consisting of a young man who may be the grown-up version of Connor and Danielle’s drowned son; a blindfolded and immobile Connor, washed up on some snowy beach; and Danielle, who has found her way from a storm into the home of two strange ladies, one who sews constantly and the other who drinks a lot of tea. The three of them (Connor, Danielle and son) are each in some separate, individual, timeless version of purgatory, I suppose. The son tries to write letters to his parents, but the postman rips them up every day; Connor is visited by a giant talking black bird, who urges him to “let go”; and Danielle realizes the tea-drinking old woman is actually the embodiment of the ocean that took her son. And they’re all trapped in their own spheres, with no way to move on or find the others.

Got all that?

I appreciate what playwright Yockey is trying to convey, and I also appreciate the lyrical language and lush, dreamy imagery of the play. But I would have much rather seen a longer version of the first act. He seemed to do so much better with characters and a story grounded in realism. The second act, with barely anything to anchor it to the first act, offered nothing in the way of either character or story development, and felt fractured from the start.

That being said, it’s worth sitting through the second act just to see the first. It’s been a while since I’ve seen such a moving and accurate portrayal of anguish. Actors Thomas Piper and Marianna Bassham have a great chemistry together, and director Kate Warner keeps that first act on a razor’s edge. The set, lighting and sound designs (Cristina Todesco, Karen Parsons, and David Remedios) are all equally lush and dreamy, providing a beautiful counterpoint to the heavy emotion of the first act and keeping the second act from being completely nonsensical. Dale Place as the mysterious Postman, is also noteworthy as the giant black bird (using an ingenious giant puppet designed by Pandora Andrea Gastelum).

Overall, I enjoyed the play. It was my first time at New Rep, and I loved the space. (Free parking didn’t hurt.) I’m excited to see their next offering, Theresa Rebeck’s DollHouse beginning February 27th.


Afterlife: A Ghost Story Written by Steve Yockey
Directed by Kate Warner With Marianna Bassham (Danielle), Adrianne Krstansky (The Proprietress), Georgia Lyman (The Seamstree), Karl Baker Olson (Young Man), Thomas Piper (Connor) and Dale Place (Postman/Black Bird)
Set Design: Cristina Todesco
Lighting Design: Karen Parsons
Sound Design: David Remedios
Costume Design: Frances Nelson McSherry
Running Time: Two hours with one fifteen-minute intermission
New Repertory Theatre, at the Arsenal Center for the Arts; 321 Arsenal St, Watertown, MA
Tickets begin at $28
Thursday 7:30 pm, Friday 8 pm, Saturday 3 pm and 8 pm, Sunday 2 pm
January 16 – February 6, 2011