SPF: Unfolding

Kristoffer Diaz is back in town! My fellow Fellow at New Dramatists, Kris is just back from spending a year in purgatory (aka Cleveland) doing all sorts of shady things, hanging out in strip clubs, befriending meth-heads, and teaching theater to young audiences. He invited me out on Sunday to see a play at the Summer Play Festival, where his own Welcome to Arroyo's played a couple summers ago.

I didn't know anything about Joy Tomasko's play Unfold Me, but I was surprised find out my friend Lindsay Firman was directing it. It was a mysterious play caught somewhere between everyday reality and heightened magical realism. A woman who works in a laundromat and her boyfriend, who handles used clothing donations at a charity are a couple. The woman is diagnosed with cancer, and the news sends both reeling apart from each other. The boyfriend tries to strike a deal with a mysterious and sexy blond, who turns out to be Death personified; while the woman is befriended by a friendly guy in a hoodie, who turns out to be the human form of her cancer. What happens next is not interesting as the basic premise of anthropomorphizing Death and Disease. There's some elusive and questionable romance that blossoms between boyfriend and Death when he tries to make a deal for Death to take him instead of laundromat girl. And there is a strange bonding over morning coffee between laundromat girl and Disease when boyfriend doesn't show up at the appointed time. In the end, the burgeoning exploration of our attitudes towards death and disease falls short and is reduced to very predictable human interactions.