Mary (Judy Kaye) and Michael (Robert Cuccioli) have been married for four years.
Watching somebody you love die is terrible. Watching somebody you don’t care about die is a whole other type of painful—one you can experience at ’Til Death, a muddled new drama in which the estimable Judy Kaye plays terminal cancer patient Mary Gorman.
’Til Death was penned by Elizabeth Coplan, a longtime marketing executive who began writing plays as an outlet for her grief following the death of a cousin and other loved ones. She has created both a podcast and an organization that address end-of-life issues through theater and art (the organization, Grief Dialogues, is coproducing ’Til Death). Few if any of Coplan’s insights into preparing for and grieving the loss of a loved one made it into her play, however. It touches on various death-related topics, such as inheritances and euthanasia, but doesn’t explore them in a coherent, dramatically compelling way.
Anne (Whitney Morse, left) and Lucy (Amy Hargreaves, right) have different opinions on how their mother’s life should end.
Many things don’t make sense in the staging and script of ’Til Death. Mary and her second husband, Michael (portrayed by Tony nominee Robert Cuccioli), live in a 55-plus community, but the set—with its textured gray walls, blocky angles and minimalist-style furniture—looks like a home design showcase, not a retirement-village living room. When Michael opens the mail, he reads Mary’s birthday cards to her, explaining what’s pictured on the front of the cards, even though she seems perfectly capable of reading and is sitting right next to him, where she can see the cards. Lucy’s ex-husband calls her on the landline in Mary’s house (where Lucy doesn’t live) instead of on her cellphone.
Mary has three children from her first marriage: Lucy, Anne and Jason. In almost every conversation Jason (Dominick LaRuffa Jr.) has in the first scene, he brags about his money or connections, and he repeatedly says, “Gormans are winners.” Then after that first scene, we never see Jason again until a brief reappearance late in the play. So why bother establishing that he’s arrogant and materialistic if it makes no difference to the plot?
Kaye as Mary looks too healthy and well-dressed for somebody in her final hours of withering away from cancer; Michael Lee Brown (right) looks too old to be playing her 17-year-old nephew, Nick.
Ditto for Lucy’s substance abuse. She goes grocery shopping for her mom and comes home with a bottle of scotch, she sneaks some of Mary’s painkillers, and she has a glass of wine in her hand the entire time she’s at her dying mother’s bedside. Yet her problem is never discussed and doesn’t have any apparent effect on Lucy’s life and work—it’s a character affectation rather than part of the story line. Lucy (Amy Hargreaves) also is relentlessly nasty to Michael. Why, because he goes to church and tells silly jokes? He doesn’t say or do anything else to merit such hostility, so she just seems like an unpleasant hard-ass.
As for Anne (Whitney Morse), from what she says and what others say to her, it’s not clear whether she’s been babied or she’s tetched in the head. She’s the only one of her siblings in Mary’s will—a sacrifice that seems out of character for the obnoxious Lucy and Jason and implausible in general (people don’t give up their inheritances because they’ve made their own money).
Anne (Morse) and her brother, Jason (Dominick LaRuffa Jr.), in ’Til Death. Photos by Julieta Cervantes
While Coplan’s script emphasizes certain points that are immaterial to the story, it shirks more consequential details. Mary’s will leaves millions to charity—where did that money come from? She was a librarian for “all those years”; her first husband was, based on a reference to Afghanistan, in the military; and there’s no talk about generational wealth. And what exactly were the dynamics in the family with the first husband? It’s hard to parse from the contradictory remarks everybody makes.
In between scenes, family photos and documents (like Mary’s oncology report) are projected on stage. These projections are unnecessary, and they grow tiresome because of the excessive number of scenes: eight in a 75-minute play. Seven scenes take place over a 24-hour period, though it may not be clear to the audience whether hours, days or weeks are passing between them. Coplan’s tactic for building suspense from one scene to the next is to end a scene in the middle of a sentence.
There are three deathbed confessions in ’Til Death. One of them is said neither by nor to the dying person. The other two come from Mary—one is a significant secret she inexplicably kept for decades (the reaction to it is also inexplicable); the other, spoken with her last breaths, negates a lot of what she’d previously said.
With such choppy pacing, slipshod writing and distracting scenic design, ’Til Death can’t even coast on the Broadway talent leading the cast, as Kaye and Cuccioli have not been given vibrant, credible personalities to work with.
’Til Death runs through Dec. 23 at Theatre Row (410 W. 42nd St.). Performances are 7 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday, with matinees 2 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday; abingdontheatre.org.
Playwright: Elizabeth Coplan
Director: Chad Austin
Sets: Teresa L. Williams
Costumes: Antonio Consuegra
Lighting: Dawn Chiang
Sound: Jesse Star
Projections: Lisa Renkel
