The Death of Me asks the big questions: What happens when you die? Is it OK to laugh when old people die? How do you find parking downtown at noon?

DETAILS

The Death of Me by Lunchbox Theatre
Lunchbox Theatre
Monday, October 8 - Saturday, October 27

More in: Theatre

“I think death is one of the great universal themes because we all have to face it,” says Rona Waddington, artistic director of Lunchbox Theatre and director of their latest, The Death of Me. “As soon as you have to deal with death, the next question that arises is that of life. Have I lived right? Have I lived well? Have I lived fully? Those are the questions that the play asks — and yes, we've heard them before, but that's because they're significant questions. They don't go away.”

Starring Citytv’s Dave Kelly, The Death of Me opens in death's office, where a very confused John Adderly (Kelly) is being given the worst kind of news. As the play moves forward, though, John is given a second chance at life, the opportunity to get it right, and in his attempts to thwart death, he's forced to examine how he's lived.

“The show doesn't just ask, ‘What is the meaning of life?’” says Kelly. “It also asks some key questions. What if the Angel of Death screwed up? What if you did get a second chance? What if your doctor was an idiot? What if your ex-girlfriend was losing her mind? What if your sister wouldn't speak to you? What if you never got to see a whale? What if the entire play only took 45 minutes?”

Shoehorning so many profound questions into a 45-minute timeslot is difficult to be sure, but not so difficult as shoehorning five locations and two planes of existence into the Lunchbox stage. With no wing space and no height, Waddington's sets need to perform acts of nigh-physical impossibility in order to maintain their illusion. Luckily, Norm Foster's script was structured to draw some comedic parallels between heaven and earth, so Waddington's layering of locations atop one another actually serves an artistic purpose over and above its purely functional one.

“Well, we hired a clever designer first,” she laughs. “Then we looked to see how we could make the set flexible. Here's an example: our hero dies and goes to heaven — that's what you see in the first scene — and then he goes back to Earth. But we wanted to keep heaven present when he goes back to Earth, so that's what we did. The shell of heaven still exists, even when the action is happening on Earth.”

Foster's plays are often characterized as taking an “entertainment first” tack. There are no overly weighty moments, no typical writer's catharsis oozing off its pages. He writes so that his audience can have a good time, and the folks at Lunchbox are set on maintaining that tone.

“The play grabbed me because it actually does ask meaningful big questions, but also puts them in the middle of some funny human experiences,” says Kelly. “And let's face it — nothing cracks up an audience like dying.”

“I would say that Lunchbox takes a ‘say yes to life’ approach to theatre,” says Waddington. “We put a high value on entertainment. We want you to come and be totally entertained.”