55 min | Dark Comedy, Drama, Solo | PG
Nancy Kenny, who brought us the dynamic Roller Derby Saved My Soul a couple of years ago, returns to Ottawa with another solo show: Everybody Dies in December. It’s a much quieter, almost interior play but, like Roller Derby, it’s about one woman’s passion for her vocation. In Roller Derby, the young woman finds her métier being on a woman’s roller derby team. In Everybody Dies, she revels in being a funeral director. Both plays are also about how the woman resolves fraught relationships with her loved ones.
Claire is a third generation funeral director. As a lonely little girl, she delighted in following her beloved grandfather into his work area, playing amidst the display caskets (she loved to lie in the fancy purple-lined one) and exploring the embalming room. After her mother inherited the family business, she followed in their footsteps and became a mortician in the Sinclair Family Funeral Services. Given her introverted personality and “weird” background, Claire was always an outsider, mercilessly bullied at school and having no close friends in the town.
So Claire talks to the corpses she is preparing for burial. These one-sided conversations with the dead reveal far more about her own life than about theirs.
Warning: she also matter-of-factly describes the steps a mortician takes to prepare a body for viewing, and some of the attendant things she’s experienced. If you’re squeamish, you may be shocked. You’ll understand why she herself wants to be cremated.
On opening night, possibly because it was a late-night performance and the lighting was, well, funereal, the performance seemed a bit “closed-in”. Kenny didn’t connect with the audience as well as she did in Roller Derby. Moreover, occasionally Kenny’s words weren’t completely audible in the largish Arts Court Theatre. But the idea of a funeral director talking about her life to those she’s preparing for burial is a good one and, with the exception of the TV series Six Feet Under, rarely attempted.
Everybody Dies in December by Nancy Kenny is playing in Arts Court Theatre on Friday June 17 at 7:00pm; Saturday June 18 at 1:00pm; Sunday June 19 at 5:30pm; Monday June 20 at 9:00pm; Tuesday, June 21 at 7:00pm. Tickets $12.
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