NOTES FROM EARTH: TWO PLAYS BY JIM NISBET
Unfortunately, it’s downhill from there, at least for a while. Alas, Poor Yorick, the first of two plays by Jim Nisbet, doesn’t deliver. Maybe it was the setup. The eeriness evoked by two guys digging a hole behind an old mortuary is shattered when Jackson, the younger of the two, turns up the Rolling Stones on his jam box and starts messing with the lyrics (“Jumpin’ Jack Flash and the shit don’t pass”). It doesn’t jibe with our notion of who they are, what they’re doing, and why they’re there.
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The man keeps talking to the sky, and it becomes clear that a nuclear holocaust has occurred and he’s talking to a former lover, Minnie Three, who escaped earth in search of a new world. He climbs down from the roof, balancing on the fire-escape railing, looking around in a half-dazed, half-crazed manner. “You can probably do without your lips in the new world. And I can do without them too! Though I remember them,” he adds wistfully.
