Death Tax
Through April 1 at the Actors Theatre of Louisville Humana Festival.
Written by Lucas Hnath. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll.
Death Tax took my breath away, not because one of its characters is an elderly woman on life support, but because it upends expectations at every turn while maintaining an admirable level of respect and concern for the essential humanity of its irascible, scheming characters.
Best of all, it refuses to get bogged down in its own drama. This is the latest show I’ve seen in what I feel is a growing trend of modern thrillers which use noir and suspense elements to drive dark dramas about contemporary paranoia and social relationships. (The Yale Rep premiere of Amy Herzog’s Belleville is another good example.)
Death Tax is loaded with compelling human situations—a dying rich woman estranged from her daughter. A hospital nurse is caught in the middle, and has passions of her own which distort her judgement—and the audience’s sense of her own priorities. There are other self-serving characters to wonder about as well.
It could easily become a mess, but playwright Lucas Hnath has the whole mesmerizing drama under control. He gives you a Double Idemnity-quality plot motivation, then inserts some great dialogue lines which I wish had existed in more classic noir films, lines in which some characters question the sanity and clarity of others: “That’s all you know, and you made up a whole story about it,” for instance or “I say murder, they say dementia.”
There is no surety about how competing schemes and dreams will pan out. Even better, when things finally come to a head, Hnath has the good sense to simplify rather than complicate, shedding baggage and honing in on his point: death and loss is hard on everyone, and we don’t always behave well when confronted with it.
There are wonderful pages-long monologue of Athol Fugard quality. But there’s also genuine suspense, heightened by the fact that we’re told at the outset that there are five scenes in the show, and when the fifth scene comes it’s a total mindfuck.