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THREE VIEWINGS
Directed by John Hudson and Wayne Paquette. Written by Jeffrey Hatcher. Starring Patricia Bell-Casey, Dave Clarke, Davina Stewart. To Mar 30. Varscona Theatre (10329-83 Ave). Tickets available through Shadow Theatre (434-5564), Accent European Lounge (431-0179) or TIX on the Square (420-1757/tixonthesquare.ca).

If Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology gave the dead citizens of that town an opportunity to testify from the grave, then Jeffrey Hatcher’s Three Viewings has the recently deceased of Steubenville, Ohio still affecting the living from the funeral parlour in series of three monologues delivered over three different caskets. 

“Tell-Tale” gives us Dave Clarke as Emil, a fussy and obsequious funeral director who nurtures a hidden passion for real estate broker Tessie, one of the diligent mourners at his parlour. In between gossipy asides to the audience he barely squeaks out his hopeful mantra of “I love you” directed at her back, and uses his position to help her scope out possible clients when their spouses kick off. 

Emil’s never-publicly-voiced infatuation with Tessie is at once goofily endearing and pathetic—he’s forever locked in obsession, always setting parameters for when he’ll muster up the courage to reveal it, but never actually acting on his unstated crush. In short, he’s acting like a repressed adolescent, deluded about the real nature of his hustling love interest—but that doesn’t make his feelings for her any less genuine, and Clarke very nicely manages to balance his portrayal even as the story takes a completely unexpected turn.

The sad yet comic “Tell-Tale” (with its intimations of Edgar Allan Poe’s similarly titled short story) is breezy compared to the John Hudson-helmed “Thief of Tears.” Davina Stewart is Mac, a hardened jewel thief whose grandmother is the “very old, very demanding, very rich harridan” she’s left L.A. to pay her respects to. The fact that she supports herself by crashing funerals and stealing bright baubles from the corpses makes this easily the most black-humoured episode of the three—but all is not as it seems here as well. While her family is stewing over a sudden change in Grandma’s will, Mac has her own agenda—and as she goes about her plans, she slowly reveals her own tragedy. 

“My husband forgot to fix the kitchen door,” Mac repeatedly tells old neighbours and acquaintances when they ask her about her marriage, and that seeming non sequitur holds more of a clue than you might imagine to her progression from heartless cynic to human wreck in one illuminated jolt of memory.  

A grieving widow and her dead husband’s disintegrating business set up “Thirteen Things About Ed Carpolotti” as the most absurdist of the three stories. Patricia Casey is Virginia Carpolotti, the dutiful wife of a local “wheeler-dealer” who discovers after her Ed passes on from a heart attack that she’s not quite as well-set-up as she always believed. With large loans from mobsters coming due, pressure from the bank, and a heartless brother-in-law to deal with, Virginia’s golden years do not look assured.

As disaster is heaped on disaster, you can’t help but squirm for the utterly bewildered Virginia, watching helplessly as the angry messages accumulate on her answering machine almost as fast as demands from creditors. With its implausible ending, “Thirteen Things About Ed Carpolotti” seems almost like a side story from a Frank Capra film, but it’s also very sweet, the deus ex machina leaving theatregoers with a final gesture of devotion and love as salve to the bittersweet stories that preceded it.