| April 2006 I Issue 20 |
"My play tries to be honest about how hard it is when someone dies.” So says Bryony Lavery, the multi-talented British playwright whose 2004 hit, Last Easter, has its West Coast premiere at The Laguna Playhouse this month in a new production directed by our own Rick Stein.
Last Easter is fundamentally a play about faith and friendship in troubled times but wraps its profoundly moving subject matter in scintillating comedy. “In serious times,” says Lavery, “we need the release of humor.”
June, a theatrical lighting designer, is dying of cancer and doing her best to be stoical about it. Her colorful friends rally around and, as Lavery puts it “try to make things as normal as possible in the most trying circumstances.” June’s family of friends includes Leah, a Jewish American production designer and Gash, a campy drag artist with a Catholic upbringing and inexhaustible memory for show tunes. The boozy Joy, an actress dabbling with Buddhism and fending off the ghost of her suicidal former lover – Lavery’s latest play, Smoke, incidentally also features a ghost – is co-opted into Leah and Gash’s plan to take June on an Eastertide driving trip through France. Although June is essentially agnostic, her friends’ intention is to test the allegedly healing waters at Lourdes.
“Almost by chance” Lavery once visited the famous city as a tourist and, like June, “had such a bad reaction.” To Lavery, Lourdes seemed “full of the wrong kind of hope.” Lourdes certainly offers no miracle cure for June’s cancer but a year later, as she pleads with her friends to speed her demise, June has experienced, in Lavery’s words, “her own kind of epiphany” and attained a state of grace. Each of her companions is in some way transformed by the experience they’ve shared.
Bryony’s funny, thoughtful play,” says Playhouse executive director Rick Stein, “is about the journey that each character takes—confronting their faith, their own mortality, and how they learn what the responsibilities of friendship truly are. It’s not a morbid or depressing evening at all. Every time you think the play might go in that direction, there’s comic relief.”
Peppering a play about a dying woman with various wisecracks, jokes and antic behavior might sound faintly irreverent but Lavery insists otherwise. “It is actually quite reverent but also light-hearted.” She says her hope is that beyond the laughs Last Easter will give audiences cause to reflect on one of her most important themes, “that human beings are incredible creatures and capable of much more than they think.”
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Bryony Lavery’s one regret is that she cannot attend Last Easter’s West Coast premiere at the Playhouse. The ever-busy writer has a new children’s play opening at Unicorn Theatre in London this month followed by workshops of two new pieces in development. Lavery is also sorry to missing what would have been her first visit to Laguna Beach. “Friends tell me it’s gorgeous,” she says ruefully. Well, perhaps next time.
Also In this Issue: |
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Meet Amy Larson, Director of Individual Giving at The Laguna Playhouse |
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