You know those people who announce they didn’t like a play or a movie because,\ the uniforms of the soldiers didn’t have the right patches for whatever unit and time frame was involved? Or the style of fork in a banquet scene hadn’t come into use for another 70 years? Seems unfair to trash all that artistic effort just because a costuming error noticeable to perhaps 1% of the audience or the wrong forks because a small theater company needed to use what they had. But there are folks for whom that detail can ruin an evening.
Having worked as an RN for umpty-ump years, I have my list of Things, too. Every medical series on television except MASH I left quickly or never started. So plays about that sort of thing I admit to casting a particularly careful eye on. The good ones, though, work well despite some problems with details, and that’s how it is with Death Tax. It’s from the pen of Lucas Hnath, who wrote, among other plays, A Doll’s House, Part 2, which the Rep did in 2018, and the current Broadway offering Hilary and Clinton. This is a guy who knows his way around a keyboard.
It’s a nursing home where Maxine (Kim Furlow) is a long-time patient and Tina (Jeanitta Perkins) is her nurse. Maxine is old and cranky and has some unnamed serious illness. “I know I’m going to die,” she announces. It’s not so much the dying that she’s concerned about, it’s her estate. Estate taxes will go up after the first of the current year, she explains to Nurse Tina, and she wants to stay alive until after the taxes go up, so her daughter (Kristen Strom) won’t get nearly as much as she would if Maxine died before New Year’s Day. (Dysfunctional R Us.) Maxine thinks the nurse is being paid by the daughter to knock her off before then. Maxine offers a solution to the problem, and Tina agrees.
Todd (Reginald Pierre) is perhaps a nursing supervisor, certainly Tina’s superior. He calls her into his office because he’s been given sort-of proof of Tina’s unethical behavior with Maxine. But he’s been dating Tina and is clearly quite smitten with her; alas, his affection is not returned in equal portion.
Somewhere in here it begins to dawn on us that this is moving away from reality. There are various signs, but the biggest one is why doesn’t Maxine just call her lawyer and change her will to benefit some charity? There’s more sticky stuff beyond nurses accepting bribes, interoffice (internursing station?) romance between unequals, and paying off physicians. But it hangs on the edge of reality so well that it all works.
Furlow does crotchety wonderfully, bringing us up to the edge of wanting to smack her but not quiiiiiite there. Perkins’ Tina is a nicely slow reveal until hormones raise their eager head; she’s great to watch and then does a second turn as a social worker in the last part of the show. Pierre’s meltdown is wondrous to watch, and he, too, has a second part as Maxine’s grandson. When we finally get to meet the daughter, whose story is, not surprisingly, rather different than Maxine’s version in this game of Who Do You Trust, Strom gives a shakily on-target rendition, which furthers our questions.
The unusual set from Jamie Perkins works extremely well, with lights from Michael Sullivan and sound by Zoe Sullivan. Bess Moynihan pulled it all together in fine fashion and it’s a remarkably interesting evening.
That said, here comes the nurse’s rant. And it’s aimed at every group that’s used a hospital bed in a set, so Mustard Seed folks, all you did was remind me.
Theatrical convention – and that includes television and all the soap operas in particular – seems to dictate that hospital beds never have the siderails up. That’s wrong. For all but the most physically able patients, at least one would be up, at least. They give patients something to hold onto and help themselves turn in the relatively-narrow beds and their mattresses which range from hard and slippery to deep and squooshy. And the sicker the patient is, the more apt the rails are to be up.
Thank you, end of rant!
Death Tax
through May 19
Mustard Seed Theatre
6800 Wydown Blvd, Clayton (enter off Big Bend)
314-719-8060