The deaths of people dear to us is a dark passage that everybody endures, usually more than once and probably felt in different ways. Regret. Anger. Desolation.
Our personal experiences can lend further resonance to someone spectacular, a new play about grieving that premiered Wednesday at the Pershing Square Signature Center.
Domènica Feraud constructs her extremely watchable drama as a 90-minute real time situation: A grief support group session happening someplace in Manhattan today.
The first ten minutes pass more or less in vaguely awkward silence as half a dozen individuals variously enter a nondescript conference room, settle themselves into chairs and wait for the meeting to begin. Watches are checked, phones scrolled, bad coffee is sampled, sweaters put on and removed, and eventually somebody notes that Beth, the group leader, is running late.
After some argument about waiting a while longer, the group gingerly begins its session by sharing check-ins on their well-being, which is a good place here to note the characters:
Nelle (Alison Cimmet) and Thom (Damian Young) are in their middle aged prime; Evelyn (Gamze Ceylan) perhaps is a decade older; Lily (Ana Cruz Kane) and Jude (Delia Cunningham) are at either end of their twenties; while Julian (Shakur Tolliver) looks to be in the middle of that decade. Not everybody is white, nobody is a celebrity and all of them are recently bereaved.
Although the session gradually reveals details about the characters’ lives and losses – a spouse, a parent, a sibling, an unborn child, among others – someone spectacular does not simply roll out a sorrowful string of sob stories.
Participants clash. Fingers point. One person suffers a panic attack. Somebody’s got a secret. Somebody else keeps nibbling at the banana bread. The playwright possesses a pleasing way with everyday talk that gives these strangers’ intimate conversations an easy flow.
And yes, there really are some honest laughs scattered throughout the drama, which concludes with a flicker of magic.
What gives someone spectacular an extra charge is how well the play has been composed and its production staged to provide audiences with a fly-on-the-wall look at the session.
The Signature Center’s flexible Romulus Linney Courtyard Theater seats 199 viewers along three sides of a projecting stage, which fosters a sense of relative intimacy.
The dots design collective furnishes a modest meeting room with scrupulous realism; the drab carpet looks worn, the rubber plant in a corner is dying, a semi-deflated balloon bobs on the ceiling. Siena Zoë Allen contributes street clothes that help to define the characters. Oona Curley keeps the lighting unobtrusive until, in conjunction with Mikaal Sulaiman’s sound design, an otherworldly moment happens.
Astutely matching such you-are-there visuals, director Tatiana Pandiani generates ultra-real performances from the actors. Everybody appears on the same page in their ensemble approach to the play; looking exceptionally human with their personable fidgets and random gestures. How they fiddle with their clothes, rearrange the furniture and advance or retreat from each other meshes to convey a believable semblance of reality that enhances the ebb and flow of the drama.
Some readers perhaps may recall Rinse, Repeat, Faraud’s drama about a young woman with eating disorders undermined by a negligent family, which appeared in 2019. Inspired by the untimely death of her mother, Faraud’s someone spectacular is a more mature and satisfying work than the previous play. Not everybody will care to be reminded of their own grief, of course, but someone spectacular is an honest, sometimes touching study in life and loss.
someone spectacular opened July 31, 2024, at the Signature Center and runs through September 7. Tickets and information: someonespectacularplay.com
