someone spectacular (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Looking back on 2024, I have inadvertently programmed myself a cycle of grief plays. How did this happen? Perhaps in the aftermath (ongoing) COVID pandemic it is a subject that more playwrights have gravitated towards unpacking lately.

My mileage with these plays has varied greatly. From the strangely funny Grief Hotel to the awkwardly, mystical Find Me Here to the memoir-style of Lorenzo to this new play, someone spectacular by Doménica Feraud, which tries to be funny and a little mystical, but just ends up a bit obvious.

Someone spectacular is set around a grief counseling session where the leader has not shown up.  Left to their own devices, the members of the group break all the rules, they play games (F/M/K) and start attacking each other and comparing and measuring their grief against one another’s.

Nelle (Alison Cimmet) has lost her sister. Evelyn (Gamze Ceylan) is not sure she is allowed to grieve an abusive mentally ill parent she is finally free of. Thom (Damian Young), when he’s not taking work calls in the middle of the session, is coping with the loss of the love of his life, his wife. Julian (Shakur Tolliver)’s aunt, who cared for him like a mother, has passed. Lily (Ana Cruz Kayne) is full of rage over her mother dying at 51. All of them have been dealing with these losses for the past three months. But the group leader has allowed newcomer Jude (Delia Cunningham) to join even though she is grieving a miscarriage from 18 months ago. It becomes a point of contention that will get hashed out by the now self-directed group.

The play feels like a vehicle built for actors as it gives each one monologue moments and big swinging emotions to play. But it just comes across as calculated and mechanical. The basic structure of character “reveals” do not lead to real discovery.

Here, you sort of know what you are getting from the start. In the end, they come to learn something about themselves and each other. But I haven’t really gained insight about anyone at all.

Even before the play starts in earnest and the actors come to the stage while the audience is still filtering in, they each have their stage business to clue us into their “character.” People-pleaser Julian insists on fist-bumping everyone in the group. Workaholic Thom is on his cell phone from the jump. Mistrusting newcomer Jude is clutching her bag to body in a self-protective manner. Aggressive Lily gets dressed in in the middle of the room and dngaf about anyone else. But these characterizations do not become more.

The play overly relies on the acerbic unfiltered Lily for its “humor” but it’s a calculated risk as she’s also unpleasant and acting out to avoid her own problems. Worse, she’s just not that funny. Jude’s story was incredibly opaque and why she is costumed as the Wizard of Oz’s Dorothy via Greenpoint I will never know. Thought I thought the other characters’ costumes fit the articulations of their characters well (Evelyn in a leather skirt not everyone could pull off, Nelle in Lululemon-esque workout gear, Lily in a sad hoodie of depression).

I liked the energy Gamze Ceylan brought to her character Evelyn. For sure, Evelyn’s story was the most detailed and contained important, relevant contradictions—the muddy confusion of love and neglect and abuse. The other characters beatified their family members and it was just so one-note. And even Evelyn is kind of canonized by her group members.

The subterranean fluorescents (lighting by Oona Curley) and non-descript community room (designed by dots) serve the therapy setting well although a white opaque plastic curtain/vertical blind surface serving as a wall confused me in it’s texture and utility. I kept anticipating our attention would be cast at times on the semi-see-through wall so that we might anticipate the arrival of the missing group leader but that did not happen. So I was left wondering why a group therapy room would have a wall that did not provide complete privacy.

Plot-wise, this group will eventually articulate their struggles, connect more with their fellow members, understand people they didn’t fully understand, and have to contemplate more loss. Maybe it was a productive session for them (though even that I question) but less so for us.

The “Chekhovian guns” of this play will include a heavily telegraphed cough and a female character frequently rushing to the bathroom for unknown reasons. You can guess it’s not IBS. Would that it were for the sake of a twist. There’s some minor otherworldliness thrown in but in a very clichéd way (so help me god– flickering lights and “last gasp” theater).

I just didn’t find the play went very deep. The characters were concepts—child grieving mother, husband grieving wife, mother grieving child, sister grieving sister— rather than actual people wrestling with a specific loss of a particular person and all the complexities of those relationships rendered through the lens of grief.