Theatre in Review: Wake (One Year Lease Theater/59E59) When talking about death, your mileage may vary. It's the most sensitive of subjects, far more so than sex, and one's response to it is profoundly shaped by one's age, health, personal experiences, and religious beliefs (or lack thereof). This is another way of saying that Wake, a seventy-minute meditation on mortality, is, more than most plays, closer to a sort of Rorschach blot. Full disclosure: I disliked Wake in the extreme -- but consider the examples below. You might disagree Essentially a staged poetry reading (text by Leon Ingulsrud and Brooke Shilling, based on work with the entire company) complete with stylized movement and a few vaguely realized through-lines, Wake is one of those plays with characters who have letters instead of names. A, a young woman, is in deep, angry mourning for her late mother; B, her sibling, provides a shoulder to rage on. C is the take-charge type, engaging the audience. D is an alarmingly articulate infant, capable of discoursing on the concept of object permanence, Ferraris, and notions of mortality in Bhutan. E is A's mother, who also has a philosophical turn of mind: "It's not like it's some mystery beyond the grasp of human reasoning," she notes. "Zarathustra, Socrates, Gautama, Jesus, Muhammad, Nietzsche, The Beatles, Nina Simone, Oprah, Britney Spears, RuPaul, and everyone else have been saying it the whole time: This is it. Find meaning and pleasure in the now. There isn't anything else." Well, if Socrates andBritney said it... Completing the cast is The Poet, whose passages, about his repeated encounters with death -- in a tunnel, on a road, outside a Melbourne cafe -- have a faintly Robert Frost quality, especially as delivered with a caffeinated urgency by Adesola Osakalumi. Other passages tend perilously toward the twee. For example: A: Grieving tastes like saltwater. B: Salty tears taste like pie. A: And this whole thing smells like Grandma. B: Grandma's got candy in her purse. A: "Purse" sounds like "hearse." B: But it also sounds like "shmurse..." A: It hurts my heart. B: It tickles my brain. Well, my brain was certainly hurting by this point. In another unappetizing sequence, C announces that she is the personification of grief, inviting diners to devour her. As a note of caution, she adds, "Purging is distasteful if sometimes unavoidable, so great effort should be engaged in avoiding it." Good to know. C returns to educate the audience in the vocal expression of mourning. "I recommend experimenting with different types of vowel combinations to find the one that feels right," she says. "The AAAs are typically prevalent as they seem most apt at encompassing despair, but a strong case can be made for the OUOUOUs as well." Soon, she has everyone enthusiastically keening the vowel sounds of their choice. The text sometimes goes off on rhyming jags. A, recalling her mother's habit of force-feeding her peas, says, "Then she was gone/And so were the peas /and even the broccoli and spinach and beans/Won't ease/My tummy ache/My stomach quake/The hurt next to the candy and cake." Instead of finding uses for "bake," "lake," and "make," she concludes with "I hope you rest in peas," a remark she finds so delectable that she says it several times. Ianthe Demos' production, aided by Natalie Lomonte's movement and music by Rinde Eckert and the single-named violinist Ren, Wake certainly strikes a unified tone. Aside from Osakalumi, the outstanding member of the cast is Cristina Pitter as D, the enfant terrible, who notes that loudly crying is "not an attempt to fix anything. That comes later when I start using it to manipulate the people around me." The design credits -- including James Hunting's set, filled with boxes suitable for hiding actors; David Shocket's lighting, with its pastel washes and rectangular blocks of subtle patterns and colors; Kenisha Kelly's comfortable-looking costumes, and Brendan Aanes' sound, which includes many effects related to water -- are all solidly done. I will add that, at the performance I attended, the audience (which included many recognizable theatre names), reacted with unalloyed delight. It's another sign, perhaps, that these days, people are looking for comfort above all in their theatregoing. To my mind, however, Wake diminishes and domesticates its profound subject, making it more friendly-like, as Eliza Doolittle might say. But there's so much more to it than that. --David Barbour 
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