Bold choices in ‘Someone Dies Again’
At first, the Kellers are a model family, given what they’ve been through. They’re quietly affectionate with each other. Two of them show outward signs of recovery: a busy life at school, a readiness to return to work. With good nature and humor, they make time for a grief ritual — drawing pictures, tearing them up, throwing the fragments in the air like confetti.
But already, in the Imaginists’ “Someone Dies Again,” little bugs have buzzed in to upset the hard-won equilibrium of Gena (Amy Pinto), Marty (G. Brent Lindsay) and Maddy (Emma Attwood). Marty found a gun among the possessions of his troubled brother, Larry (David Roby), who’s staying with them. And a lawyer ( John Most, a stage name for a local theater journalist) with a nefarious agenda has contacted Marty wanting to reopen the 6-year-old case of their son’s death, reigniting their North Bay town’s racial tensions. The death of Miles, a white kid, happened in a Latino neighborhood.
By the end of the deeply uneven world premiere, whose San Francisco run opened Friday, May 20, at Z
Space (a Santa
Rosa run will follow), disease of the body, mind and society has taken over. Árpád Schilling’s play seeks to delineate, painstakingly, how just a couple of small disturbances can fester, eating away at the thin fabric that holds us together.
Part of the show’s problem is a tendency to overexplain and, procedural-style, hang out inside the explanation without escalating the dramatic stakes. Each introduction of a new facet of a character’s life seems to spawn a web of exposition scenes instead of moving by the logic of plot necessity. It’s as if the play keeps feeling like it has to show you a certain scene before it can show you the ones it wants to.
“Someone Dies Again” dithers through a monologue from the ghost of Marty and Larry’s father ( John Craven) to show how the brothers got to be the way they are; it simmers a grocery store scene at a low-grade tension for minutes on end when it ought to have heated right up to a boil.
Yet the Imaginists boast the kind of lambently naturalistic acting that makes you suck in and hold still, as if you’ve intruded on something sacred and real. The performers are all trust and ease shorn of fuss and flourish; they’re art
ists who've invested the time and rigor to know their characters and text so well they can now just simply be.
Schilling, who's originally from Hungary, makes bold choices that are just as likely to expand your notion of what's possible in theater as cast you out of the world of the play.
A ghost sticks his head through a picture frame and enters the world of the living; a bubble gun makes a dance sequence look magical at the same time that its pointed barrel and pulled trigger stand in for all the violence lurking around the play's corners, in its shadows. Yet Schilling's always having his actors thrash and crawl on the floor or waft through overlong scene changes in ways the show hasn't earned and that make the mood evaporate.
Music and sound effects by the one-named Xtevion only make matters worse. The sound, a caricature of a horror movie's discord, keeps drowning out the actors' voices, blaring in like a beep from afar that won't turn off.
“Someone Dies Again” is astute about the ways white women think that because they're earnestly feeling feelings, the whole world should drop what its doing and forgive them their sins. It's marvelous with the way family members can only see past and talk over one another, like a triple-helix spiral whose lines never intersect.
It has little new to say, though, about white men's susceptibility to violence when they perceive they've lost racial dominance. Lindsay's Marty is just beginning to lose his grip when the show requires him to take a dive off the deep end. We've seen a version of this man far too many times already — and at this point, the Imaginists' sketch is just as opaque and frustrating as all the others.
Editor’s note: As a professional courtesy, The Chronicle is using only the stage name of the theater journalist who is acting in the show, because his performance is part of a larger journalism project.