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Let's face it: tell folks they're going to be spending an evening with dying people, and most people will discover an urgent need to stay home and water their plants. Which is doubtlessly why actor/writer and long-time hospice volunteer Lester Thomas Shane put together his funny, moving one-man play "Mortal Coil: Voices from a Hospice": to share how rich, engaging, and dramatic the act of confronting one's mortality can be.
The show, which originated at The Basic Theatre for the New York International Fringe Festival, is now playing at Cleveland Public Theatre's intimate Downstage space on selected October dates. It's a compassionate, carefully-crafted hour with a baker's dozen of intensely memorable characters, drawn from life -- patients, caregivers, family, and hospice workers. Shane, an accomplished character actor with a mobile face, impersonates them all -- from a shy 22-year-old Hispanic girl to feisty Jewish alter cockers.
The show begins with a simple set-up: Bess, a pragmatic nurse eager for her shift change, briefs us on the current hospice inhabitants. Dressed in hospital whites, on a stark white chair in a pool of light, Shane then becomes each character, grounding each by a distinctive accent, a characteristic gesture, the rhythm of a speech pattern. Shane's performance and writing, Jared Hammond's direction, and the production as a whole are spare, subtle, and effective -- and the characters are stunningly diverse.
A soft-spoken Puerto Rican lesbian talks about the secret place in her mind, a magic cave she can go to where everything is peaceful. A bullying Italian heart patient pleads with his son on the phone to visit, but can't pry him away from a TV sports event. And in a tour-de-force episode, we visit an old man whose dementia has turned his language into shards of rhymes and disconnected words: "I need a toy-toy-toy I need a toider a toider a tomato" -- a haunting scherzo movement.
The writing is refreshingly unsentimental, and in places is mordantly funny. A paranoid old man with prostate cancer is hilariously spicy, as he spits his "poison" medicine into a plant and imagines fellow patients as spies in ratty bathrobes. Many of the best moments happen as patients confront the wearing cliches they get from visitors and caregivers. A patient with a brain tumor wryly laughs at the notion that he has "unfinished business", when he can't remember the simplest things -- from what "sour" tastes like to his parents' faces.
Shane saves the best for last: Estelle, an Alzheimer's patient in a coma, who mocks the New Age Celtic harp music her relatives keep playing as they tell her to "go into the light". Shane shows us the radiant inner Estelle -- a feisty, jazz-loving woman who beyond all external reasons hangs on to life because even at 87 she hasn't tasted enough of its juices yet.
It may be a cliche to say that a show like "Mortal Coil" is ultimately life-affirming -- but it's true. It's also an entertaining brief evening in the theatre, well worth seeing.
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