"What's your job?" a young lady asks the boy she's just met. "I'm a gold-digger," replies the smitten lad. In a manner of speaking, this is accurate. He and his brother occupy their nighttimes cutting jewelry and prying dental crowns from recently-interred corpses.
This distasteful choice of employment, we learn, was precipitated by the death of their mother - a traumatic event plunging their father into depression that propels him to roam the streets, dressed in his late wife's clothes, in which he poses as a prostitute. His son's dream of a new start for their bereaved family is in idyllic Switzerland, financed by the treasure they steal from those who, after all, no longer have need of it. Robbing the helpless dead, however, is not as safe as the desperate thieves anticipate.
Andrew Marvell may have declared "the grave's a fine and private place/but none, I think, do there embrace," but the revenants in actor-turned-playwright Fabrice Melquiot's whimsical view of the hereafter are not content to requiescat in pace. Indeed, the sole still-breathing participant - a nervous necrophile poet searching, à la Edgar Allen Poe, for his recently deceased beloved - emerges as an almost unwelcome interruption to the far more interesting antics of the departed.
Scenic designer Ewelina Dobiesz envisions our cemetery setting less as that of a pastoral garden than of a gone-to-seed funeral parlor, ambience heightened on opening night by the rain drumming on the roof of Trap Door's carriage-house auditorium, its decay acclimating us to conventions such as characters collapsing like unstrung marionettes by way of exiting a scene.
Director Max Truax also imposes extensive physical interaction on a text rendered stilted by David Bradby's British-idiom translation - no Spoon River Anthology talking heads in this boneyard - to keep the stage picture fluid and engaging throughout Melquiot's often nebulous chronology.
Likewise, securing our attention for the play's 90-minute running time is an ensemble of actors whose grasp of their respective personae reflects an infectious suspension of disbelief that quickly draws us into their universe. David Steiger and Kevin Lucero Less anchor the action as the two Beckettian siblings, Casey Chapman's stereotyped poet and Tiffany Joy Ross' likewise generic phantom bride do what they can with what they are given, but Cassandra Kaluza's exuberant ingenue and Bob Wilson's stately Sunset Boulevard-styled transvestite redeem the occasional doldrum with humor and presence.
