Modern Spokane stages darkly comedic ‘Best Brothers’

Hamilton and Kyle Best aren’t exactly on the greatest of terms when they receive notice of their mother’s death. She’s been killed, they’re told, in a freak accident at a gay pride parade, and now the eccentric brothers have to overcome their differences to put her affairs in order.

That’s the jumping off point for Daniel MacIvor’s comedy “The Best Brothers,” which opens tonight at the Modern Theater Spokane. It’s essentially a two-man show, but there are two other figures hanging around the peripheries of the story: One of them is the late Mrs. Best, and the other is Enzo, the Italian greyhound she adopted shortly before she died.

“I would definitely say it’s a dark comedy,” said the show’s director, Brooke Kiener. “It’s very character driven, so the comedy comes from their scuffles and their reactions to each other. It’s not farcical by any means, but it’s definitely lighthearted.”

As they argue over writing the obituary, formulating the eulogy and fielding condolences, Hamilton (Dave Rideout) and Kyle (Todd Jasmin) are forced to grow closer through the shared loss of their mother. Because of their diametrically opposed personalities, “The Best Brothers” often resembles Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple” if Felix and Oscar were blood relations.

“On the surface, it takes as its premise the exploration of how death affects a family,” Kiener said. “But it’s really, at its heart, about the two brothers coming back together and mending the rift in their relationship.”

Because the show begins after the mother’s death, and because her dog Enzo remains off-stage, neither character ever appears to the audience. But MacIvor finds a way around that by having Hamilton and Kyle occasionally take turns embodying their mother, communicating to us from beyond the grave in a narrative device that resembles a comedic spin on William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying.”

“It’s a long narrative piece in which she describes her choice to get a dog, and how the dog changed her life and how to love,” Kiener said. “One of the big discoveries is about how we learn to love and what it means to let yourself love, and how is the mother doing that for her two boys even after her death?”

Kiener, an assistant professor at Whitworth University, says that working with such a small cast – and with two actors she’s known for years – has been a nice change of pace.

“It was really delightful coming back into the downtown theater scene and working with two old pals,” she said. “It’s been fun helping them find the femininity of the mother character. The tension between the brothers is very much on the surface throughout the play, but to dig beneath that and find the moments of warmth and tenderness has been a great challenge.”