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The finest social satirists from Voltaire and Jonathan Swift, to Lenny Bruce and Larry David, have found their own mediums to properly carry their messages of social inappropriateness. For Christopher Durang, the neurotically-charged playwright of the Catholic screed Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All to You and the meshuggeneh family reunion The Marriage of Bette and Boo, the stage is a second home; his comedies put his (sometimes semi-autobiographical) characters in situations as absurd and frightening as an hour at a psychoanalyst's couch set up in a confessional. He knows his way around a stage, not as subtly or cynically as Wallace Shawn or as vituperatively or flamboyantly as David Mamet, but somewhere in the uncomfortable middle.

Durang's 2005 Miss Witherspoon at the Unicorn Theatre (co-directed by Cynthia Levin and Steven Eubank) is a minor play, but as an expression of futility mixed with humanity it rings full-throttle. A woman named Veronica (Jan Rogge) is first seen at home on the phone, talking to an anonymous someone about her depression; she is advised on pill-taking and listens with an edge of irritation, as though one too many talk-show hosts and best-selling experts have stuffed themselves into the closet of her mind. As she begins to make out a grocery list, a fuzzy spiked ball suddenly drops from the ceiling; then another and another, as a large Chicken Little bursts through the set claiming the sky is falling, as it turns out, indeed, it is: Veronica faces the audience to explain about Skylab (which when launched in 1973 was soon announced that it would be abandoned and eventually fall to earth on reentry). Her fear was that one large chunk would kill her, out of the blue: a Durang special. Yet, she reveals she killed herself sometime later (now, that is the real Durang punch-line). Why? Why not?

And so this middle-aged woman, lonely in life, learns how lonely the afterlife can be, or would be, if she could only get a moment's peace. The plot, already as scattered as a Scrabble board, goes for broke as Miss Witherspoon (as she is now called, from a poem her father speaks in one flashback: "You know that nursery rhyme, whither the spoon goes, whither the fork") undergoes one reincarnation sequence after another, led in some undeclared middle world by an Indian in a sari named Maryamma (Amy Urbina): why? Why not?

The various reincarnations - childhood, adolescence (where her mother abuses her), even a scene as a dog - pass too quickly and sketchily to amount to an epiphanic ending, like Proust at the winding-down of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Along the way, we learn Miss Witherspoon is actually resistant to all of Maryamma's overtures: neither religious relief nor personal second chances at happiness are considered by Miss Witherspoon. In one scene, as a baby, she wants the family dog to kill her.

This reversal of sorts on A Christmas Carol, with the Ghost of the Past and the Ghost of the Future colliding  (when all Miss Witherspoon cares about was her present, when she was her own ghost), makes for gleeful, if fitful, theatre. Durang's many jokes and asides clear the stage like field goals: after having requested an audience with Saint Peter (who appears looking like Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings films), Miss Witherspoon tells Maryamma, "Look, I was thinking. I don't want Saint Peter. I want to go to the Jewish heaven which is like general anesthesia."

Durang's notion of anti-bliss (Miss Witherspoon says how grateful she killed herself before 9/11: how to deal with that on top of ordinary misery?) has a slick patina of jus'-kidding that negates all the negativeness we are supposed to rally around. Here, Durang makes Beckett seem like Oprah; yet, in Beckett's oeuvre the comedy rises with bleak certitude. Durang's idea about rejecting spiritual help needs to be more sharply drawn, like the Sixties film Bedazzled with Peter Cook as the Devil and Dudley Moore as Stanley, a short-order cook whose three wishes keep being nixed on some technicality. At the end, Stanley is back where he began and not necessarily the happier, though enough to defeat the Devil. Durang's play tosses off aphorisms just as if Camus and Sartre were comedy writers making existentialist one-liners, rather than exposing themselves to real pain.

As the unhappy dead woman, Jan Rogge, a veteran of area productions, shows the proper confusion and disillusionment. Amy Urbina makes a cheery ethereal figure, and Matthew Rapport, Helen Gonzalez, and Dina Kirschenbaum fill out the rest of the characters with enthusiasm. The star of the play, though, is Christopher Durang, a sometime actor. It is hard not to visualize him in the role of Miss Witherspoon; he knows kvetching when he sees it. Apparently, death is no end when it comes to complaining.

REVIEW
Unicorn Theatre
Miss Witherspoon
Co-directed by Cynthia Levin and Steven Eubank
Runs December 4-January 3, 2010 (Reviewed Sunday, December 6, 2009)
Unicorn Theatre
3828 Main St., Kansas City, Mo. 64111
For tickets call 816-531-PLAY or online at www.UnicornTheatre.org

Top photo: Cast members Miss Witherspoon (Jan Rogge) and Maryamma (Amy Urbina). Photo by Cynthia Levin.

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups. 

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