Phillyist Reviews... Early in the Mourning

Early in the Mourning is a new play by P. Seth Bauer, currently showing at the Plays and Players Theater. On a howling New Year's night in Massachusetts, an elderly Jewish couple try to come to terms with the loss of their son—a middle-aged, homosexual teacher of writing—whom they never quite accepted during his life. Their grieving process is first complicated by the fact that the dead son has appeared and is hanging around the house, unsure what he is supposed to be doing, and second because one of his former students, an aspiring and tortured writer, pays a late night visit, and has powerful, conflicted feelings for his old mentor.

The four cast members of Early in the Mourning gave remarkable performances, and while Helen McCrane, playing the sorrow-crazed mother, had the meatiest part, John Devennie (playing the much more restrained father) was also impressive. The play, on its opening night, was polished and well-directed, and it moved smoothly from comedy to despair and back again. P. Seth Bauer deserves credit for creating such a powerful and convincing mother and father and letting us get deep into the different stages of their grief.

However, I spent much of the night wondering about how the supernatural element in the script was ever going to resolve itself: I left the play not completely convinced of its value. The first problem was that the ghost, Daniel, rarely got beyond the "virtuous gay son" archetype—he simply wanted his parents to accept his teaching career and his partner—and this made it hard to see what the play was actually "saying." As Daniel rarely felt like a fully fleshed-out person, with the selfish, self-contradictory goals and beliefs we all struggle with, this absence left the play with little to do but show us two stuffy Jewish parents rather predictably coming to accept their son's homosexuality. Additionally, whatever his visiting student had been meant to see by the end of the play was also unclear: it seemed like "main character" status had been too liberally spread between the dead son (trying to get his mother to let him go), his mother (trying not to do so) and the student (who seemed to have no clear goals at all). Had I been Bauer's writing teacher, I would have asked him to make the ghost more of a real person, and to give the student some kind of purpose. I also noticed that the most powerful and disconcerting moments of the play often occurred when Daniel merely watched his student and parents talk, when he simply observed—when, in other words, the metaphor of lingering presence that he represented was allowed to just be a metaphor.

Early in the Mourning
Now through 11/22/09
Shows at 4 p.m., 8 p.m.
Plays and Players Theater, 714 Delancey Place
Tickets: $10-$20