Everybody Dies in December

Broken Turtle Productions—Red River College

In this forty-five minute one-woman show, Nancy Kenny of Ottawa plays Claire, a third-generation funeral director. Claire generally presents herself as a straight-as-an-arrow professional woman, conservatively but fashionably attired, but she allows herself the opportunity to express various transgressive thoughts at times. These thoughts include such things as wondering if she should have sex with a corpse or fantasizing about faking her death by using ice packs to make her skin feel cold.

The format of this show consists mostly of a series of monologues delivered to various specific audience members as if they were the bodies of people in Claire’s mortuary. For example, she jokes to someone she knew, now dead and on her table, that although she herself has changed since high school, he has changed even more. I’m glad Nancy didn’t pick me for one of these talks; I think I personally would have found her eye contact, coupled with the material, somewhat unnerving, but it seemed effective from a distance. Sometimes she breaks from this style to have Claire talk on a cell phone to a man named Travis, with whom she is having a somewhat difficult relationship, and this adds some depth to her character.

Nancy performs Claire in a somewhat quiet, understated way. She sometimes stands still, just speaking softly. This fits her character well, but greater projection of her voice would have made this show easier to enjoy. It was especially hard to hear her when she was speaking to an audience member on the opposite side of the room. Unfortunately there were also technical problems with the lights during the particular performance I saw. A Fringe staff member approached me after the show, after having seen me write some notes, and told me that it was too bad that we weren’t able to see the wonderful lighting effects that were intended. Here’s hoping that this problem will be resolved for future performances.

Konrad Antony