Playwright’s ‘Dusk’ a stellar work
It has been a privilege watching Spokane Civic Theatre playwright-in-residence Bryan Harnetiaux hone his craft over the years, and his new play, “Dusk,” showcases all of his strengths:
“His ability to dramatize concisely and effectively a complex social problem (in this case, end-of-life decisions).
“A knack for quickly delineating characters with a few well-chosen details.
“A talent for inserting just the right amount of comic relief into a play that is, essentially, serious-minded.
“An understanding that, first and foremost, a playwright’s job is to entertain.
I was certainly entertained, as well as moved and impressed. And not only because of the script. This world premiere production features a crusty and gruff performance by Nik Adams as the irascible Gil, a 64-year-old man recovering from a heart attack. The entire production is directed with intelligence and dignity by Diana Trotter, who brings Gil’s family to life in one quietly dramatic afternoon, around a simple kitchen table.
The play begins with Gil’s daughter Nan (played with gentle exasperation by Sara Nicholls) conspicuously leaving a series of official lime-green forms on Gil’s kitchen table. Gil takes these forms and, one after another, crumples them up, rips them to shreds and stabs them with his knife. That sums up Gil’s opinion about lime-green forms.
They are DNR forms, as in, Do Not Resuscitate. Gil has congestive heart failure. His family, as well as nurse practitioner Elizabeth (played with charm and skill by Brooke Kiener), needs to know his wishes in the case of a second, and apparently inevitable, heart attack.
If you have ever lived through this kind of difficult family decision, you know the conflicting emotions it can unleash. In just a bit over an hour, Harnetiaux distills nearly the entire spectrum of these emotions. Gil is understandably torn about what to do, yet this is nothing compared to the resentment he feels about being treated like some kind of child. As he tells his gathered children, he used to be their father, “but now I’m just your problem.”
This exasperates Nan, because she is simply trying to do the right thing. She repeatedly tells her father that she doesn’t care what he decides, as long as he decides something. Otherwise, she’ll have to simply guess – in the most traumatic possible circumstances – about whether to have him resuscitated.
Meanwhile, the situation brings long-simmering sibling resentments to the fore. One son, Fitz (played by Benjamin Lee), has been mostly absent. Another son, Micah (played by Maxwell Nightser), is so religious that, during his father’s heart attack, he chose to perform a baptism on his dad instead of calling 911.
Meanwhile, visiting nurse Elizabeth simply wants to get a clear directive from Gil about how to proceed in case of … well, in case. My wife, a visiting nurse herself, said that “Dusk” could work as an effective training session about how to handle these difficult kinds of situations.
Since this is the first full production of “Dusk,” not everything, of course, clicks perfectly. One flashback scene, in which the “children” play a game of hide-and-seek, struck me as awkward for the simple reason that it’s hard to ask adult actors to act like 8-year-olds.
The characters of Fitz and Micah could use some fleshing out. Both come off as one-dimensional.
Yet overall, this play delivers exactly what it promises. It puts you inside what feels like a real, honest family crisis, and it makes you grapple with an issue that will be even more common as the baby boomer generation comes of age.
Gil finally checks off a series of boxes on that lime-green form – but Harnetiaux never tells us which boxes. That’s not the important part. The important part is that he finally faced the problem. Facing it is the hard part.