Luna Theater's "How to Disappear Completely' (2nd review)

The British playwright Fin Kennedy's How To Disappear Completely and Never Be Found is not so much a primer on vanishing as a meditation on the cruel impossibility of oblivion.

The play begins with the five-person ensemble delivering an unsettling flurry of bite-sized narratives about mysterious disappearances. Things coalesce around Charlie (David Stanger), who, clutching a funeral urn, is regaining consciousness in a subterranean lost-and-found office. The subway rumbles overhead as somber official informs Charlie that he fell onto the tracks.

It's the beginning of a tough day for Charlie, who's still reeling from his mother's death. A swirl of criminal charges, cocaine-laced debasements and merciless health-care workers drives him to the breaking point as well as insomnia, and no one will listen to his troublesome symptoms.

All the while, he's "seeing a girl," though not in the usual way: A steely, white-coated pathologist (Bethany Ditnes) keeps intruding, addressing him as if he's a corpse.

Cell phones replace umbrellas

The play's early questions often concern the effects of modern technology. "You can tell the soul of a nation by the stuff that it loses," the man in the subway office recites; then he waxes about an epic modern shift in tube riders' left-behind items: Once it was forgotten umbrellas, now it's invariably lost cell phones.

Despite Kennedy's many allusions to the digital entanglements of modern communication, when Charlie decides to steal a new identity"“ that of a dead childhood friend"“ the steps he takes are utterly tangible, beginning with a visit to the graveyard and continuing through the offices of malleable British bureaucrats (played with relish by Jennifer MacMillan) who deal in drivers' licenses, birth certificates and passports.

Throughout the play, while Charlie ostensibly tries to shed the trappings of his old life, he clings to objects"“ an urn, a flask, a bottle, a watch"“ like talismans of reality and remembrance.

"Every single place you go, you leave pieces of yourself," warns Charlie's instructor, Mike (Mark Cairns). The play's journey into the business of crafting a whole new identity becomes a concrete thread in an otherwise surreal script.

One-man cacophony

In a standout performance, Stanger builds a one-man verbal cacophony of anger and misery. He perfectly projects Charlie's defeat or defiance in silhouetted poses against the production's large screen. Director Gregory Scott Campbell crafts a furious staccato pace that rises and falls throughout the performance— as vehement and disjointed as an argument on an online message-board.

Michael Long's digitally projected images and video back almost every scene on a large screen, threatening to overwhelm the Adrienne Theatre's small venue (the actual props are mostly limited to a single chair placed directly in front the screen). But these images and static mostly enhance the story's bizarre shroud. Aaron Oster's sound design expertly ushers us through the show's strange twists.

Dead friend on Facebook

As the benefits and possibilities of Charlie's new life begin to sour and unravel, Kennedy achieves an often-unsettling effect by emphasizing the crushing impossibility of escaping yourself. At some points, the play evokes the uncomfortable feeling I experienced recently when Facebook suggested I "friend" an acquaintance who'd been dead for more than a year.

As Charlie begs helplessly for sleep throughout the play, it's as if he's pleading for an oblivion that he can never achieve. "I'm always trying to get away from myself and I can't," Charlie moans. Charlie's complaint probably strikes a broad chord, especially in an Internet world that continues to amplify and share our identities, even after we die.♦


To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.