Vigil

Reviewed by Holly Bartges

He’s nuttier than a fruitcake.

Lawrence Hecht and Patty Mintz Figel in a scene from Vigil.

She’s horrified and throws a hairbrush at him.

He prattles on and on saying nothing but jumbled up words dancing off each other that end up revealing a great deal about this dislodged man who feels unwelcome in his world.

She screams and hollers, making no sound. Her eyes and her facial expression keep up a running conversation bypassing her vocal chords.

The set is a bedroom designed by Tina Anderson featuring mismatched furniture for Morris Panych’s deliciously poignant play Vigil. Produced by Modern Muse Theatre Company, Vigil plays at The Bug Theatre on an all too bad too short run through April 2. Not to be missed for its quality, content, artistic thrust, and chemistry connected actors.

Directed with delectable sensitivity by Billie McBride, Lawrence Hecht and Patty Mintz Figel claim ownership to Kemp and Grace. Two lonely unwanted people who meet through scurried circumstances in the middle of a thunderstorm. Mean, hurtful, unkind words are thrown into the air surrounded by humor ending up to be warm, touching and very very honest funny.

Kemp receives a letter from his Aunt Grace informing him she is about to die. He, being her only living relative, rushes to her side. An old lady who spends most of her time in bed, Grace reacts with horror when this bumbling jabber walkie rushes into her bedroom in the middle of a thunderstorm, babbling a hundred miles an hour, tripping over his eye teeth so he can’t see what he is saying. He hasn’t seen her in 40 years. Miffed over her not having any photos of him or anyone else for that matter, he chides her for not caring about him, but then no one cared about him. He wants to know when she is going to die, deciding he will begin sorting through her things to get ready for an estate sale. Tying a handkerchief over his nose, he tells her he’s allergic to dust, and then he wants to know if she will sign her will leaving everything, of course, to him.

Without being tied to a specific time or place, without diving head first into political issues or health care for the aged, without poking fingers inn the face of who does what to whom, or doesn’t, as the case may be, Vigil looks into the lives of two very different but very lonely people and how they find themselves and each other. One an elderly woman and two a middle aged neurotic man who never felt wanted, who never found the right gear to engage his brain, who finds whining and complaining compatible to his babbling, and who blames everyone else for his looser streak.

Neither one of these roles would do well with less equipped actors than Hecht or Figel. Hecht must wear Kemp closely attached to his own being or Kemp would fall flat on his face. Kemp maintains 99 percent of the dialogue, and must keep it running at a roller coaster rate while he prattles and babbles, revealing significant pieces of information about himself, keeping his character fresh, nasty, and funny all at the same time. Hecht gives an amazing, amusing performance. Figel must engage Grace to be involved in everything Kemp says with the use of facial expressions and body language only. She gives such an astounding performance it is difficult to keep the eyes off her. This play could easily be dubbed a monologue except for the expertise Hecht and Figel have established that keeps it rolling as an honest dialogue between two opposing forces that provide laughs between the tug of the heartstrings.

Kemp arrives thinking he will be there only for a couple of days, and ends up staying a very long time because Grace just doesn’t die. He becomes observant of the seasons outside her bedroom window. He becomes nervously aware of the woman across the street who appears to be staring at him. He jabbers incessantly maintaining a marathon pity party for himself. She knits. He feeds her butterscotch pudding, all the time wondering out loud why she doesn’t die and get it over with. Then he discovers a mysterious truth about him, about Grace, which unravels another mystery about him.

A few years ago, Panych visited his partner’s mother in the hospital. In the bed next to her was a woman very close to death, experiencing emotional agitation. At one point, two candy stripers attempted to explain to the woman why her family members would not be coming from England to visit her. This upset the woman tremendously, and it was clear to Panych the candy stripers were ill equipped to handle her emotional state of being. The concept began to whirl around in his head about loneliness, the act and art of dying, dysfunctional families, and humor that trots along side of the experience. The result was Vigil.

Vigil is the fourth production for Modern Muse in a very short time. Jason Robert Brown’s engaging musical The Last Five Years starring Susan Dawn Carson and Jeffrey Roark continues its run at The Buntport Theatre through April 9, 2006.

Gentle in its meanness and biting in its gentility, Vigil wraps itself snugly within the walls of exquisite lighting designed by Robert Byers, and sound designed by McBride. The rain, thunder, lightening and strategic blackouts seem to reiterate the dialogue between Kemp and Grace. Their words can almost be heard through the engaging sound effects.

Kemp has no friends, and he realizes it may have something to do with the fact he doesn’t like people. He smoked only to annoy his mother. When she died, he found quitting was difficult not because he was addicted to smoking. He was addicted to annoying her. He becomes overly concerned about Grace’s health. It’s improving, and that’s not the way it is suppose to be.

In the entire play Grace has probably 15 spoken lines, accompanied by a mountain of running dialogue with, about, and to Kemp. At one point, Kemp even builds a contraption to slide over her bed to assist in her dying decision. With his fumbled bumbling, primitive apparatus backfires on him leaving him to be a bumbled fumbling idiot much to Grace’s amusement. At Christmas she gives him a present, which he doesn’t know what to do with. Placing it aside unopened, he muses “why spoil Christmas by unwrapping the presents.” Exasperation overcomes his impatience; this wasn’t exactly how he envisioned the rest of his life would be. Out of his crumbled mouth tumble the words, “If you don’t die soon, I think it’s going to kill me.” Grace has a great many pithy comments for him, spoken through her eyes and her pouting lips, but the commentary through Figel is as clear a though she actually spoke words.

This is an experience of human nature at its most tender wickedness with truth hobbled to conniving loneliness. Vigil is an experience of two highly-engaged artists who not only engulf their characters but each other. It is a heartwarming laugh streaked with separation, rhyme, reason, and purpose and last minute redemption.

They both dance to the beat of a different drummer under the direction of a common drum major: self-imposed loneliness.

The real tragedy in Vigil is its all too very short run. It needs, wants, and deserves an opportunity to be experienced. Don’t miss.