EVELYN DANCES
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But fortunately Cynthia Hanson, who wrote and performs this 75-minute monologue, is both competent and canny. As a writer, she manages to avoid most of the traps of overt sentimentality. As a performer, she is warm, believable, and aware of the pitfalls of messy displays of emotion; dramatic tension is better served when tears are withheld. Rather than weep into her dead husband’s shirt, Evelyn dons it and goes about her business. In the hands of a lesser actress, Evelyn might have been just another steel magnolia, pretending to be strong while she wallows in pathos. Hanson makes her a tough Texas housewife just changing out of her black dress and waiting for her two small children to go to sleep so she can sneak a cigarette and shake free of the tensions of “a lovely afternoon at the funeral home.”
As she unwinds, she chats with the audience about the absurd mechanics of funerals, her new identity as a widow, and the reactions of family and neighbors to her loss–they’ve offered everything from sour-cream pound cake to an envelope full of clip-and-save coupons. She sips from a bottle of Wild Turkey so she’ll know “how Larry felt the night he died,” and she rails at the deceased for not being strong enough to survive the failure of his oil-rig leasing business when the entire west-Texas community he lived in was mired in the same sort of financial disaster. “Try telling oil people not to speculate,” she says. “Boom or bust, but you’ve got to be strong enough to take the bust.” Larry turned to drink and finally went for a midnight swim that may or may not have turned out the way he planned.
