Dust, a solo play written and performed by Milly Thomas, comes at us after debuting at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, moving to London’s Trafalgar Studios in 2018 and trailing multi-starred reviews along the way. It turns out the acclaim is pretty much deserved for a monologue with a consistently disturbing undercurrent.
Thomas, wearing a tight flesh-colored costume (Anna Reid is the designer), appears on, or moving energetically around, a high metal table, which in time can be taken as a morgue slab. She’s Alice, an up-to-date young woman with an Instagram account and a filthy vocabulary who’s discovering she just died. Nonetheless, she’s somewhat surprised that she still has the capacity to comment on her new reality to anyone prepared to listen—in other words, the audience.
To what she owes her death isn’t revealed for some time, although astute observers may cotton to the cause before she announces it. References to her having a habit of cutting herself are a red flag. (A quasi-spoiler coming farther down seems fair enough, since the published play gives everything away on the cover.)
Her post-death freedom leads her to drop in on, among others, her mother Daphne, father Frank, delinquent brother Robbie, boyfriend Ben, and friend Ellie. Indeed, she doesn’t only visit them but spews all the resentments she’s had towards them during the time when they could see her. For instance, as life goes on for the living through the next months, she’s not happy that Ben has found new and sexually active romance.
Not only is Alice as candid as an open casket (she’s in one at the funeral service) about others, she’s also open about herself and the profligate life she led while she had life. She’s certainly someone who didn’t behave with absolute decorum. Over time it’s increasingly transparent (though she never is to others, now) that her behavior stems from a deep and rarely unrelenting depression. In her possession are packs of razor blades. (The spoiler mentioned above is this: If you’re thinking she died the way you’re thinking she died, you’re right. That may be why she’s condemned to wander Purgatory-like.)
Thomas, looking slim and nubile in her outfit, is extremely good in the role she’s provided herself, and she’s directed with pungency by Sara Joyce and lighted imaginatively by Jack Weir. She takes stage commandingly, striding back and forth, repeatedly sitting up and lying down on the high table. Reenacting Alice’s wretched demise, she pulls off the death throes with memorable aplomb.
While patrons experience Alice’s incident-laden life and death with her, it may be that a few will begin to speculate on how much Thomas is reflecting on her own life. It’s plausible, of course, that a playwright could take on the subject out of pure author’s curiosity or in an attempt to clarify for herself the history of a severely troubled relative, friend, or acquaintance. But what if that’s not the case? Has Thomas composed the work for pressing therapeutic reasons? If so, is it working?
A last word about Thomas’ raw language. After Alice enters and cases her whereabouts for several seconds, she faces the auditorium and utters her first startled word: “Fuck.” The impression is that she thinks to command audience attention with the expletive.
She might not realize, however, that nowadays “fuck” is such a stage staple that rather than shock, it does the opposite. It threatens to anesthetize. As she proceeds, she proves that “fuck” and its forms are true to her character. They hit the ear a few dozen times during the shortish play. Alice is, by the way, not simply a foul-mouthed dummy, but it could be that the initial monosyllabic outburst hurts more than it helps. Some patrons may need to be won back from it.
Dust opened September 5, 2019, at Next Door@NYTW and runs through September 29. Tickets and information: nytw.org
