A Life (Playwrights Horizons) by Adam Bock

I love, love, love David Hyde Pierce.  I will drag my husband, or anyone else who is near, to anything that he is in and I have never been disappointed; until now.

Maybe I should clarify that.  I wasn’t disappointed in Mr. Hyde Pierce’s portrayal of Nate, a discontented, middle-aged gay man living alone in New York and working at a dead-end job with people he doesn’t especially like.  But, BIG SPOILER ALERT, halfway through the production, Nate dies (which involves many painful minutes of looking at his dead body propped against the door while the sounds of the city cycle through a couple of days) and Mr. Hyde Pierce spends the remainder of the production as a corpse.  As my husband said to me, “When Nate dies, so does the play”. 

The remainder of A Life takes place, variously, in Nate’s apartment after his body is discovered, a funeral home (where the people preparing his body do a nauseatingly good job of convincing you that they are clipping his toenails) and at his funeral.  Interspersed with the very little action which happens in these locations, is Nate’s disembodied voice narrating snippets of his after death experience.

I adore big drama that deals with the questions; life, death, meaning, reason, existence.  Unfortunately, I didn’t feel that A Life dealt with even that, much less any of the others.