Somewhere, Beyond the Sea

REVIEW | AFTERLIFE: A GHOST STORY

By Richard Martin

Perhaps Dylan Thomas was onto more than he realized when, in his “Reminiscences of Childhood,” he recalled having blithely watched “the fierce religious speakers who shouted at the sea, as though it were wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that . . . .”

In Steve Yockey’s “Afterlife: A Ghost Story,” now in its premiere at New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, Danielle, full of anguish, and empty of much else, kneels on a beach near the booming waves and shouts fiercely at the sea, accusing it of being wicked and wrong to roll in and out like that, and in one swift, terrible moment to have taken her son.

She is engulfed by grief.

At first we don’t know why Danielle can scarcely bear to step into the small, well-ordered house by the sea. Her husband, Connor, strolls right in and makes ready to put up the storm shutters as the wind picks up and the ever-louder thunder cracks ominously. But by the middle of the night, when Danielle goes to the ocean’s edge, we understand. The funeral for their son is over. They have escaped their families to return to their home, but not to stay, just to board it up before the storm.

With funeral, family condolences, the return home, arrangement of the storm shutters, and other steps toward moving on, Connor has silently organized his grieving process. Danielle, who shifts from composure to petulance to anger to isolation and perhaps hallucination, has not.

Stranded on separate emotional planes, Danielle (Marianna Bassham in a wonderful performance) and Connor (nicely underplayed by Thomas Piper) now have no idea how to talk to each other or even to be with each other. Danielle, who understands this better than Connor, tells him, “It’s hard to start talking again when you get used to not talking.” Which brings her down to the ocean.

What they want most will never happen. What they need most – each other – seems almost unreachable because in every way except for their physical location they are in two different places. Connor wants to fix them, and he’s started with himself. So the hard is about to get harder.

Mr. Yockey draws us into this void with remarkably affecting and truthful dialogue, completely absent of any melodrama. We care about Danielle and Connor and want to know whether they can reconnect and reconcile themselves to what has happened. But that’s not where the story goes.

Instead, we’re transported to an afterlife, and the focus moves abruptly from the personal to the metaphysical. What is the afterlife? Where is it? What do people do there? And do they connect with the world we live in? I suppose the play’s title is a clue.

The problem is that Act 2 is a different play. It is not unrelated to the first act, which ends on a note that I won’t give away here, but the change in focus and character, in rhythm and tone is so abrupt and far-reaching that it leaves us suspended in midair. Here a young man spends his time looking out into – space? – and otherwise writing letters to his parents. Each day, a postman visits, listens patiently to different things the young man tells him, accepts a letter, but then tears it up and throws it away. At one point the young man says that he almost drowned once, but was washed up somewhere far away.

Here, time is fluid and amorphous. Although the young man is certainly Danielle and Connor’s son, he is not the small child we had envisioned, and the two images feel disjointed.

There are others in the afterlife, who also interact with a resident functionary like the postman. Although never clear, it seems that the task for each person is to spend the time necessary to come to terms with his or her life on earth.

But while many of us may be interested in what an afterlife might be like, it’s living here and now that most of us want to understand. How can we do it well, or at least better? When confronted with tragedy and heartbreak, how do we face them? And how do we then find a way back to our daily lives when someone we love deeply is no longer there? Few of us will escape these hardships.

Still, “Afterlife” is a play you should see, and not just for the first act. Mr. Yockey’s writing is exceptional, and the play is skillfully paced by the direction of Kate Warner, who is also New Rep’s artistic director. Cristina Tedesco’s warm and tidy beach-home set creates just the right counterpoint to those who live there. And special accolades must go to David Remedios, whose sound design is in essence another character in the play.

You may not get any answers, but the questions are important. Oh, and keep your eye on the letters.

(With Adrianne Krstansky, Georgia Lyman, Karl Baker Olson, and Dale Place)