"Every Day a Little Death": Stray Dog's "Lobby Hero" movingly tells of small tragedies

The essence of tragedy is the fatal flaw in the protagonist’s noble character. It’s a crack in the foundation that eventually causes the entire edifice of their life to come crashing to the ground, usually with fatal consequences for all involved.

Gary F. Bell and the cast of Lobby Hero

This can be thrilling in the theatre, I think, at least partly because it so rarely happens in real life. Most people have very few great flaws, but very many minor failings. Little mistakes, tiny hurts, and small betrayals can inflict pain, but there’s no great, heaven-storming crash. “Every Day a Little Death,” as the song from A Little Night Music goes.

The four characters in Kenneth Lonergan’s 2001 drama Lobby Hero, live streaming in a compelling production by Stray Dog Theatre through Friday July 31st, are ordinary working stiffs rather than nobility, and their story isn’t so much tragic as it is ironic. All four do what they think is the right thing, but it inevitably turns out wrong. No empires fall, but feelings are hurt, careers damaged, and friendships crippled. Life goes on, but everyone dies a little.

Jeremy Goldmeier

Set in the lobby of a middle-income apartment building in New York City in the wee hours of several consecutive mornings, the story of Lobby Hero revolves around the hapless Jeff (Jeremy Goldmeier), whose aimless life has left him working the graveyard shift as the building security guard. His stern boss William (Abraham Shaw) tells him to shape up and pushes self-help books on him which, of course, Jeff never reads. Jeff yearns to impress rookie cop Dawn (Eileen Engel), but she’s smitten with her overbearing senior partner Bill (Stephen Peirick)—until she discovers that the purpose of his late-night visits to the building is a regular hookup with a woman on the 22nd floor.

William, meanwhile, has problems of his own. His brother has been implicated in the particularly heinous rape and murder of a nurse who had the misfortune to witness a gang of teenagers stealing drugs from a hospital. William’s brother claims he’s innocent, but he hasn’t got an alibi and asks William to cover for him by claiming they were at the movies together. For a man of William’s moral principles, it’s a serious conflict. He’s not completely convinced by his brother’s protestations of innocence, but he also knows the cops will assume a young black man with a troubled past and no alibi is guilty regardless of the truth.

Mr. Lonergan has drawn all four characters in such believable depth and detail that their trials are immediately moving. The more I think about the play, the more powerful it grows—a sure sign of great writing.

Director Gary F. Bell has assembled a very strong cast for his production. Mr. Peirick is completely convincing as the swaggering bully Bill—the sort of role he rarely gets to play, in my experience. Mr. Shaw shows the slow crumbling of William’s moral foundation in painful detail.

Ms. Engel all too clearly details the painful choices demanded of a woman taking on a man’s world in the pre-#metoo era and the personal cost of making them. And Mr. Goldmeier’s Jeff is a sad and touching combination of decency and ineptitude. The ultimate schlemiel, he means well but does a good thing badly, with unfortunate results for everyone.

The cast of Lobby Hero

Mr. Bell has given Lobby Hero a semi-staged production recorded live on the Stray Dog stage. All the characters are in costume and make limited use of props, but each one is enclosed in an acoustically dampened plexiglass booth to insure maximum protection from the coronavirus pandemic. They communicate via microphones and headsets, creating a kind of hybrid of stage production and radio play. Video edits allow actors to “fade to black” when they exit, but otherwise this has the immediacy of a real-time performance.

That said, the lack of blocking and a physical set tends to make the play a bit static at times and the actors can’t do much in the way of movement inside their individual booths. I couldn’t help wondering whether this might have worked better as an actual radio play, with liberal use of sound effects to make up for the lack of set and some props. It is, in any case, a creative approach to doing theatre during the plague years.

Lobby Hero is available for on-demand streaming through Friday the 31st, but you must reserve a ticket in advance online.

Review: Forever and a day

Kim Furlow and Jeanitte Perkins
Photo by Jill Ritter Photography

At the beginning of Lucas Hnath's troubling drama Death Tax at Mustard Seed Theatre, we meet Maxine. She's rich, dying and convinced Nurse Tina is trying to kill her. When she confronts Tina, her accusations have unforeseen and irrevocable consequences.

When I first saw Death Tax at the 2012 Humana Festival, I thought it could benefit from a bit of trimming. I still think so, but I also think it has undeniable dramatic punch, demonstrating forcibly the corrupting effects of money and power-and, for that matter, of want and powerlessness. It also raises disturbing questions: as medical science advances, will we become a race divided between those who can purchase virtual immortality and those who can't? And what will that mean? Death Tax suggests the answers might not be pleasant.

Death Tax unfolds mostly as a series of monologues with a few duet scenes, and provides one of the great monstrous characters of the stage in the character of Maxine. She ruthlessly manipulates everyone around her: Nurse Tina (who is not, in fact, trying to kill her), Tina's boss Todd, Maxine's daughter, and even, in a chilling final scene, a social worker and Maxine's grandson. She uses money and later guilt as weapons to prolong her life, destroying many others in the process. Like Sunset Boulevard, this is an American horror story without the supernatural.

In Mustard Seed's production, Kim Furlow gives Maxine an unexpected vulnerability, which makes the character less awful and the moral ambiguity of Hanth's script even more pronounced. Jeanitta Perkins's performance in dual roles of Nurse Tina and Candice is a tour de force, creating two characters so radically different that her on-stage transformation at the start of the last scene is almost a conjuring trick. Reginald Pierre creates less strongly but no less effectively contrasting characters as Tina and Maxine's grandson Charley. Kirsten Strom conveys the confused anger of Maxine's unnamed daughter perfectly.

Bess Moynihan's direction is clear and focused. The cumbersome wall units of Jamie Perkins's set impede the fast scene changes Hnath calls for in his script, but even so the show moves at a good clip, coming in at around 90 minutes with no intermission.

Death Tax continues through May 19th at Mustard Seed Theatre on the Fonbonne University campus. It's an important show and deserves to be seen.