DYING IS PRIVATE: THE SATCH AND MO PLAY
If a playwright is honest, he can be forgiven a lot. A play may be unfocused and awkwardly structured, but a few elements of truth make it worth seeing. On the other hand, some perfectly structured and tautly developed plays can be so dishonest as to seem a maddening waste of time. Beau O’Reilly’s Dying Is Private: The Satch and Mo Play lacks a sense of pace, and its plot lurches haltingly from one scene to the next. Yet there’s something undeniably affecting about it. Jeff Helgeson’s Time & Tide is a crisp, professional bit of play writing, but it really pissed me off.
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Dying Is Private, at the Curious Theatre Branch, is a cathartic work about the relationship between art and death. Satch (Colm O’Reilly) is a tortured painter, unable to express emotion about anything except colors and numbers. Mo (Anita Stenger), his roommate and platonic lover, is a motorbiking, picture-snapping, polka-dancing free spirit who longs for the kind of love and companionship Satch seems unable to provide. We watch the relationship between them blossom as they interact with the offbeat individuals they encounter and as they try to comfort each other when, every night, an unseen man coughs ceaselessly over their heads.
The play gets a little long, yet we admire Colm O’Reilly’s and Stenger’s performances as Satch and Mo and can appreciate the many inventive bits of stage and lighting business devised by the Curious Theatre Branch. We can truly praise Beau O’Reilly’s writing and the honesty that comes through whenever Satch and Mo are onstage. With a little self-editing, O’Reilly may be able to turn this interesting hit-and-miss work into something shorter and more polished.
And then, just before the final blackout, Helgeson introduces his gimmick. The audience gasps as the lights fade and we’re forced to address the author’s contention that each side in a war thinks its own cause is noble, that we’re no different from our enemies. At the same time we realize just how hard the author has been working to conceal Michael’s true identity. This is not an honest approach.
