Partial Comfort Productions

The Bereaved

Variety/Sam Thielman/September 9, 2009

It’s quite a surprise to see Thomas Bradshaw pull his punches. This is a playwright, after all, who has delighted at least twice in writing extended scenes of child molestation and once included a fantasy bit in which a black slave imagines having slaves of his own. Shy he ain’t. With “The Bereaved,” though, Bradshaw has a larger point to make about privilege, and his oversexed Grand Guignol style is reined in a bit in its service. He’s still dealing with the same nice, upper-class sitcom denizens he ravaged in “Dawn,” but this time he’s somewhat more pointed and cohesive.

“In order to maintain our lifestyle, we need to make around $350,000 a year,” says Michael Schwartz (Andrew Garman), underemployed new widower and father of the well-meaning Teddy (a very good Vincent Madero), a young man who devotes much of his time to self-abuse. Like the childlike characters in “Dawn,” Michael is both totally free from the legal consequences of his actions and utterly baffled by their biological cost. When inscrutable fate sends his wife Carol (McKenna Kerrigan) a heart attack after she inhales an avalanche of Bolivian marching powder, Michael calms himself and his wife’s best friend Katy (KK Moggie)… with more blow.

What follows is a sort of parody of maudlin deathbed scenes, as Carol arranges for Michael and Katy to get married and support themselves and Teddy, who is in the midst of discovering his flourishing sexuality with fellow high school student Melissa. She’s played by Jenny Seastone Stern, an extraordinarily game actress to whom something terrible is done in almost all of Bradshaw’s New York productions.

If you have any affection or empathy for anyone in this play, you will dislike it intensely and probably walk out. This is either the problem with or the joy of Bradshaw’s work to date: He demands contempt, or at least he presents you with such extravagant horrors, you have to wall yourself off from their emotional content. Scorn appears to be the easiest way to do that — and the preferred way in “The Bereaved,” where there’s little question about whether or not we’re allowed to find its events funny.

These characters’ mishaps get giggles, whether it’s teen pregnancy or accidental death. It’s a parody, just like Edward Albee’s “The American Dream,” and we’re invited to feel comfortable in our superiority. If we blink and get offended, we’ve lost the avant-garde game.

May Adrales directs the play with more irony than Bradshaw would probably like — the script has his stock note requesting a totally straight performance of its intentionally stiff dialogue and uncomfortable revelations. It’s a little hard to tell if that irony isn’t sometimes in the aud reaction, though: Most of the surprising content revolves around the characters’ sexual fetishes, and people coming to see a provocative play will always giggle at consensual sex. Lee Savage’s sets and Whitney Locher’s costumes are fine.

It’s a little frustrating to watch Bradshaw’s gifts manifesting themselves only occasionally in comprehensible social commentary. The moments that underscore the characters’ incredible privilege hit the mark perfectly, as when Carol tosses off a short line about Teddy wanting to eat dinner out (“He likes Bouley”). Considerate drug dealer Jamal (Brian D. Coats) is a terrific character who sets everyone on edge whenever he walks onstage, but he has only a handful of scenes.

Bradshaw excels at getting his audience’s attention, no question, and he clearly wants to give voice to his conscience. But with so many protective layers of irony and cruelty, it’s hard to feel anything.

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Time Out New York/Helen Shaw/Spetember 8, 2009

Poor Thomas Bradshaw. He can’t drop a hankie in this town without being called a provocateur. And he doesn’t drop hankies: He writes deadpan comedies that feature graphic onstage rapes, race-baiting and relationships that make your stomach throw half gainers. But I don’t believe Bradshaw is simply out to needle us. Yes, his hilariously bitter pill, The Bereaved, divides audiences: Some sit stonily; some hiccup with laughter. Yet Bradshaw’s game isn’t just gross-out gags, or the Marquis de Sade via Reefer Madness. He’s actually playing a subtle dramaturgical Jenga, pulling out all of theater’s support structures (character! argument!) and alarming us with how much he has left.

Like Sarah Kane with a sense of humor, Bradshaw pursues degradation with a terrier’s thoroughness. Here, lawyer Carol (McKenna Kerrigan) and her husband, adjunct professor Michael (Andrew Garman), are facing Carol’s impending death. How will Michael make ends meet and pay for son Teddy’s school, not to mention support the family’s burgeoning coke habit? Since Bradshaw uses shock as a tool—somewhere, there must be a stage direction that reads, “Then he licks her ass”—I mustn’t tell you too much. Instead, I can only marvel at how director May Adrales amps up Bradshaw’s two-dimensional After-School Special spunk with a cast that meets Bradshaw’s naughtiness with insouciant cheer. Vincent Madero’s Teddy and his girlfriend (little crumpled-up Jenny Seastone Stern) whip off their clothes with bouncy abandon; Brian D. Coats has enormous fun being everyone’s secretly racist nightmare. Best of all, Garman flails delightedly through his depravity, almost too tall for the stage and far too wicked for this world. The morning after, I actually found myself bereft without him.

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New York Post/Frank Scheck/September 10, 2009

Thomas Bradshaw, whom the Village Voice dubbed “Best Provocative Playwright” a few years back, has described his plays as “like reality on crack — reality without the boring parts.”
Well, he’s at least half right.

The playwright behind such works as “Strom Thurmond Is Not a Racist” is clearly out to shock. But watching his plays is like spending time with a small child who constantly throws tantrums — after a while, you simply tune out.

It’s that way with his new play, “The Bereaved,” which starts with corporate lawyer Carol (McKenna Kerrigan) and her mostly unemployed “adjunct professor” husband, Michael (Andrew Garman), celebrating her latest legal victory with booze and cocaine.

Carol suddenly collapses. Diagnosed with a potentially fatal heart condition, she proposes that he immediately marry her best friend (K.K. Moggie), who enthusiastically has him acting out her elaborate rape fantasies.

Meanwhile, the couple’s teenage son, Teddy (Vincent Madero), whose habit of pleasuring himself in school has been embarrassingly (and grossly) revealed, hooks up with a young cokehead (Jenny Seastone Stern) who promptly gets pregnant.

This is the sort of twisted parody of American family life in which Dad — having discovered his son snorting cocaine — says only, “Can you get some more?”

Unlike, say, Harold Pinter, whose outrageous characters and situations were marked by savage intelligence and wit, Bradshaw seems mainly intent on furthering his image as a provocateur.
But the endless series of supposedly shocking plot developments quickly proves tedious. With no underlying emotional reality to anchor the proceedings, the evening devolves into an overextended, unfunny sketch.

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Stage and Cinema/Kestryl Lowrey/September 11, 2009

Thomas Bradshaw’s reputation as a provocateur precedes him. Perhaps that’s why I wasn’t surprised when the first scene of The Bereaved featured two parents discussing their son’s semen. The on-stage spanking and analingus scene hardly made me bat an eye. I can imagine the content would have been more surprising to audience members who didn’t know to expect it.

Granted, as graphic as Bradshaw’s work can be, it doesn’t feel gratuitous. He describes his plays as “hyperrealism” or “reality without the boring parts.” The New Yorker attributed him with the dubious honor of “almost singlehandedly taking on the issue of race in the theatre,” and it’s true that many of his plays skewer racial assumptions and stereotypes. Don’t expect a lecture or a polemic, though—and don’t expect race to be the only issue on the table.

The Bereaved is witty and fast-paced, with a plot reminiscent of an after-school special minus the moral. Director May Andrales knows how to work with Bradshaw’s muscular text, keeping scenes wry and punchy. With a less skilled director, the dialogue could have become flat and shallow; Andrales and her cast are clearly having a good time, and their enthusiasm shows. How else could they pull off a black-face rape fantasy so engagingly?

The cast works well together, embracing their endearingly dysfunctional characters without any hesitation. Michael (Andrew Garman) acquiesces to his wife’s (McKenna Kerrigan) dying wishes with a befuddled affability, which only increases as the drama continues. Playing his new wife Katy, actress KK Moggie has delightful timing and deft control of her facial expressions, while actor Brian D. Coats layers racist stereotypes onto Jamal, crafting a character that we’re all secretly grateful to not encounter in a dark alley. Meanwhile, the teenagers Teddy (Vincent Madero) and Melissa (Jenny Seastone Stern) exude a youthful awkwardness enhanced by a gleeful self-assurance in their own invincibility.

For a play titled, The Bereaved, none of Bradshaw’s characters seem particularly sad. Sure, Mom just died, but why waste time mourning when there is coke to snort and virginities to lose? This may not have looked like any bereavement I’d seen before, but then again, it didn’t have any boring parts.

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The New York Times/Jason Zinoman/September 15, 2009

The first scene of Thomas Bradshaw’s latest and funniest work, “The Bereaved,” finds Carol (McKenna Kerrigan), a corporate lawyer, walking in on her underemployed husband, Michael (Andrew Garman), as he snorts cocaine off the kitchen table. After a moment of disapproval, she tries some herself, collapsing on the ground before being sent to the hospital, where she makes an unusual deathbed request, asking her husband to marry her best friend. Michael, surprised at first, flashes a smile that seems to express one clear thought: Jackpot!

Cocaine and sudden death are nothing new for Mr. Bradshaw, the cult theater artist. But while his provocative explorations of race and sexuality like “Purity” and “Southern Promises” receive most of the attention, his gift as a stylist marks him as a real talent. He has proved in play after play that he has a confident vision of the theater that is his own. The politically incorrect plots jump merrily from one outrage to another, never pausing to explain motivation or linger on subtext. His dramas ask: What would happen if every dark urge, lingering resentment and unedited ugly insult that popped into your head came spilling out of your mouth?

In the past directors have portrayed this heightened style as dark melodrama or moralistic provocation, with mixed results. But in this gleefully unpredictable portrait of New York yuppies the director May Adrales employs a lighter comic touch, establishing a slick normalcy that masks rather than draws attention to the outlandish world of the writer. Backed by a spunky pop soundtrack, scenes start with a jolt, gain momentum and finish with a twist. The plotting of “The Bereaved” moves impatiently from rape fantasy to teenage pregnancy to drug dealing.

No playwright applies as ruthlessly Hitchcock’s definition of drama as “life with the boring parts taken out.” But something surprising happens when the preposterous shifts accumulate. The madness onstage starts to take on its own persuasive logic, and once you accept that these people have no social filter, you start to even have some compassion for them. Perhaps Carol’s suggestion of remarriage is not a dramatic contrivance but a hyper-rational handling of an extremely tragic situation. And when Michael descends into the criminal world, he’s just trying to help his family. It’s quite a sneaky achievement for Mr. Bradshaw that by the end of his skewed drama the preposterous appears kind of ordinary.

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TheaterMania/Andy Buck/September 10, 2009

One thing that playwright Thomas Bradshaw cannot be accused of is not knowing the meaning of “don’t go there.” And indeed, while The Bereaved, now at the Wild Project, goes “there,” it’s also unclear exactly, where “there” is. On the surface, Bradshaw’s newest piece is about a woman named Carol (McKenna Kerrigan) who, afraid that she’s terminally ill, frets over the financial and emotional well-being of her family. But rather than create a serious drama, Bradshaw rarely demonstrates that he’s trying to be more than a naughty provocateur.

Indeed, what’s missing from this quick summary of the plot is the semen-drenched underwear, the flung condoms, and the naked white man (Andrew Garman) who wears blackface while anally raping his lover (KK Moggie) because she likes it that way. Tying this all together is a story of drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and racism, told in a style that parodies the classic cautionary tale. But to make this sort of play work requires a confident command of language that Bradshaw hasn’t yet mastered.

Bradshaw appears to be shooting for a kind of hyperrealism, perhaps similar to playwright Richard Maxwell, with whom he has worked as an actor. But whereas Maxwell transforms the ordinary rhythms of life into often extraordinary art that is at once real and stylized, Bradshaw takes the ordinary and makes it ordinary. The play is darkly funny now and then — especially when a character’s train of thought suddenly leaps the track and veers off in an unexpected direction — but that’s pretty much the game. At the end, we’re left with a series of vignettes that try to top each other in sheer outrageousness.

It would help a little if all of director May Adrales’ actors were working on the same page. Kerrigan, Moggie, Vincent Madero, Jenny Seastone Stern, and especially Brian D. Coats — who takes the role of a Harlem drug dealer right out of 1970s Hollywood and plays it dangerously, squeamishly straight — really seem to believe in their characters. But Garman, who plays Carol’s husband, Michael, hasn’t similarly committed himself to this level of hyperrealism. There’s still a distance there, as if the actor can’t quite believe what he’s got himself into — even if one cannot necessarily blame him.

But the main problem with The Bereaved is that the playwright’s primary goals seem to be shock and giggles, which gets wearisome after awhile.

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nytheatre.com/Martin Denton/September 3, 2009

The Bereaved, Thomas Bradshaw’s new play, is—I think—about narcissism. The characters in this play never quite get over themselves long enough to focus on the real needs and wants of anyone else: even when he’s visiting his dying mother in the hospital, 15-year-old Teddy can’t stop playing his video game; and even when she’s dying, control freak Carol can’t stop ordering her family members and best friend to accede to her every whim.

Bradshaw fills the play with people who are driven by their basest instincts and find ways to satisfy them, come hell or high water. Carol’s husband Michael is a cocaine addict and something of a sex fiend. Her best pal Katy has racist rape fantasies. Teddy’s girlfriend Melissa is also a coke addict, and wildly promiscuous to boot. Teddy’s libido is so out of control that he masturbates during classes at school (leading to a pair of soiled underpants that is the first inciting incident in the raucous, surreal plot). The only character in The Bereaved who seems to be in command of his id is Jamal, who is Melissa’s drug dealer.

The first part of the play introduces us to most of these people, and then (in a plot turn that has been disclosed in the press release and elsewhere) Carol has a heart attack and eventually dies. What happens after that includes a host of hot-button stuff: an unwanted pregnancy, the threat of foreclosure, vending drugs to schoolchildren, racial profiling, and cops shooting someone armed only with a toy gun.

The question is, what is all this outrageousness in service of? As in most of his previous works, Bradshaw parades taboo after taboo in The Bereaved; but if you saw Purity (in which two affluent men rape a 9-year-old girl) or Cleansed (in which a skinhead bangs a mixed-race girl in a school toilet) then nothing here can possibly jolt you. I suppose The Bereaved is meant to satirize something Bradshaw’s seeing in the zeitgeist, but he’s played this hand before, and so, for me at least, the thing lacks teeth and claws. Bradshaw and his producer Chad Beckim podcasted about the play on nytheatrecast (here); they talked about the play’s “hyper-realist” style, how it packs gut-punch after gut-punch as it zips through its scary-zany plot. All true enough; but I kept having to ask myself what this mirror is intended to reflect.

Partial Comfort Productions (of which Beckim is co-artistic director with Molly Pearson) has done a loving job bringing the play to the stage, with first-class production values and a splendid cast (Andrew Garman as Michael, McKenna Kerrigan as Carol, Vincent Madero as Teddy, KK Moggie as Katy, Brian D. Coats as Jamal, and Jenny Seastone Stern as Melissa; Coats is particularly terrific here). Director May Adrales keeps things fast and furious, if not as in-your-face as I have seen other Bradshaw works performed (the nudity, of which we are warned pre-show in the lobby, is real but utterly modest, for example).

Bradshaw is a playwright of remarkable talent. He taps into a level of (in)human egoism that few of his contemporaries ever try to explore. And he writes great dialogue and scenes: funny, raw stuff that gets at least part of the audience howling, and, when he lets his characters breathe and feel, which happens only seldom, genuinely affecting moments as well. With The Bereaved he has created, yet again, a play that stays in the memory, whether you want it to or not.

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Theatre Is Easy/Molly Marinik/no date

BOTTOM LINE: Effing funny and freakishly relatable (at first anyway). This play is a prime example that high-quality downtown theatre does still exist.

If one were to see a play called The Bereaved, written by a playwright named Thomas Bradshaw, one might expect a solemn tale, perhaps a depressing story about death or coping with loss. One could not be more wrong. The Bereaved is indeed a story about death, a broken family, and coping with tragedy. But it’s also hysterically funny in an “I can’t believe that just happened” kind of way. The audience laughs in spite of itself, and very quickly the humor trumps anything intrinsically sad.

The premise is really quite depressing. Carol (McKenna Kerrigan) is a high-powered Manhattan attorney slash wife and mother. She suffers a heart attack and spends the subsequent weeks in the hospital. During that time, she makes sure to finalize plans for her family so that when she dies (she’s not optimistic about her recovery) her part-time professor husband Michael (Andrew Garman) and 15-year old son Teddy (Vincent Madero) will be cared for. As Carol anticipates the end, her family and best friend Katy (KK Moggie) try to cope with the situation. And it’s perhaps in those coping mechanisms that they lose sight of any responsible decision.

The Bereaved is an appreciated theatrical mindfuck that keeps the audience’s attention-you think you’re seeing one play and it turns out to be another. As the characters disengage from reality you wonder if they were always bat shit extremists or if their situation is a result of their trauma. The tale Bradshaw weaves builds geniusly: at the beginning the story is relatable, albeit on an extreme level. But as it unfolds, the characters unhinge and their antics, once quirky, exaggerate to the unpredictable. This provides for tremendously fun storytelling as the absurdity escalates and the audience wonders what could possibly happen next.

Although Bradshaw’s script is worthy of accolades on its own, the biggest reason The Bereaved is so successful is because the cast is all-around fantastic. The actors deftly develop characters that are all too real and then ride the wave as story progresses. They all have excellent comic chops and the comedy is intentionally played through an understated demeanor. And most importantly, the entire cast remains committed, whether they are naked or not (and there is a lot of nudity). These actors can no doubt justify everything their characters do in this play and as a result, the audience believes them wholeheartedly.

It’s to Bradshaw’s credit that the audience is kept laughing, but May Adrales deftly directs the play, bringing everything together and keeping it grounded despite the growing ridiculousness. Adralas gives everyone in the cast a time to shine and with every character weighted equally, she creates a truly ensemble piece of theatre.

I don’t usually gush about plays I see, especially about new plays off-off-Broadway. But Partial Comfort does good work and The Wild Project is quality downtown venue, and most importantly, The Bereaved is a really well-done production. It’s not perfect yet (the ending is a little abrupt) but I sincerely hope it gets the acknowledgement it deserves, and hopefully another run in the future.

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Backstage/Erik Haagensen/September 9, 2009

Thomas Bradshaw has had the shocking insight that selfish people behave badly, and he spends a long 70 minutes sharing it with us in “The Bereaved.” This self-styled provocateur playwright serves a remarkably mild dish here.

The scattershot plot, which is decidedly not the point, takes place today in New York City and has to do with a dying mother’s determination to see her surviving family financially secure after her death. What Bradshaw does is choose some high-concept, highly improbable actions that allow him to raise such hot-button issues as sexuality, race, violence, drugs, and crime, then line them up like dominoes and shove. “The Bereaved” plays as if it wants to be a harsh Jules Feifferesque cartoon, but it never touches the stylization necessary to achieve that kind of intensity.

Neither director May Adrales nor the talented company—Andrew Garman, McKenna Kerrigan, Vincent Madero, KK Moggie, Brian D. Coats, Jenny Seastone Stern, Christopher T. Van Dijk, Brian J. Maxsween—has been helped by following Bradshaw’s stage directions: “The characters should be played with the utmost honesty and sincerity. The irony in the play should be underplayed…at all times…. The play should be directed in a straightforward and realistic manner.” As his characters barely approach two dimensions, they can’t sustain naturalistic acting. And the naturalism neutralizes any savagery that might be found in Bradshaw’s surprisingly ordinary observations.

Lee Savage’s modest Manhattan apartment set proves perfectly functional in the Wild Project’s attractive, comfortable space. Whitney Locher’s contemporary costumes are well-observed, and Jason Jeunnette lights it all resourcefully. Qui Nguyen provides the convincing fight choreography. Somewhat less convincing is the simulated sex.

To pull this kind of thing off successfully, you need to work in hot primary acrylics. Bradshaw has settled for pastel Crayolas.

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musicOMH/Richard Patterson/no date

Thomas Bradshaw is beginning to make a name for himself in the New York theatre scene. After plays like Cleansed,Purity, and Strom Thurmond Is Not A Racist, all provocative pieces dealing with race, human sexuality, people’s concepts of perversion, drugs, and a host of other controversial topics, the shocking nature of his work threatens to overwhelm the content of his plays, which pack a significant wallop.

Much as one would worry for the reputations of writers like Edward Bond and Sarah Kane, whose plays at the Royal Court in England were ushered in more with controversial Op-Ed pieces in the newspapers than positive notices, one worries that audiences will walk away from Bradshaw’s plays with a sense more so that what they saw was shocking than that it was emotionally honest.

Still, somehow, Bradshaw manages to accomplish exactly his desired effect. In his latest effort, The Bereaved, currently playing at the Wild Project in the East Village, there’s no end to the mayhem. Characters are constantly snorting coke, there’s on-stage nudity and sex (including an instance of anal rape involving black face), plenty of harsh language and exaggerated racial stereotyping. And in spite of all this, what ultimately comes through is the sense that Bradshaw’s aim is not merely to shock but to hold up a hyperreal mirror to his audience, seeming to say “This is what you guys look like, or at least it would be if you were just a tetch more hardcore.”

The Bereaved focuses on a family in the wake of crisis. Michael is an adjunct professor whose wife Carol, a big shot lawyer, finds herself in the hospital when she snorts a celebratory line of coke after winning an important case. Facing possible death due to complications, Carol prepares for her family’s continuance after her death, arranging for her husband to marry her best friend Katy, assuming that this will be the best scenario for her 15-year-old son Teddy.

Meanwhile, Teddy reacts to the situation by turning to cocaine as well, with the help of his girlfriend Melissa and her dealer Jamal. Eventually, the situation gets out of hand, and Michael, as the would-be breadwinner of his new household, finds himself sending Teddy and Melissa out to sell drugs in order to earn the family’s keep.

The madness resultant from these situations is riddled with black comedy, but Bradshaw’s impressive strength is in leaving the humor to develop out of the play’s situations rather than mining for easy laughs. Despite many of the shocking situations throughout, there aren’t many moments where one feels that Bradshaw was writing merely to illicit winces or guffaws. This is thanks in part to the swiftly-paced, farcical direction of May Adrales, who keeps Bradshaw’s dialogue snappy and well-timed, as well it should be.

Make no mistake, Bradshaw certainly intends to provoke, as most good plays do. “This is sick,” one audience member across the aisle from me blurted out during a quiet moment in the play. But could that audience member truly say he saw none of him- or herself somewhere amongst the exaggerated mishaps on stage? It’s doubtful.

After the many moments of laughter subside, there’s a lingering sense of awkwardness in the air when an audience has to question itself: “Why do we think this is funny in the first place?” This is Bradshaw’s impressive gift as a playwright, to capture what real people do and exploit it for his own dramatic purposes. The Bereaved, a rather impressive entry in Bradshaw’s ever-expanding oeuvre, is no exception and should not be missed by those seeking out the best new writing.

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CurtainUp/Deborah Blumenthal/based on 9/11/09 performance

As we watched an actor unpack groceries from a Whole Foods shopping bag, I whispered to my friend T”hey don’t sell Oreos at Whole Foods.” It was within the first two minutes of Thomas Bradshaw’s The Bereaved that we picked up this minor (and forgivable) grocery error, but it rather set the tone for the whole evening. Not to say the production was sloppy, for it wasn’t— but the appearance of those Oreos stood for a certain kind of missed realism that the entire play seems to have wrapped itself around.

I had been expecting another high-octane, everyone-crowded-around-the-table-yelling dysfunctional family play as those offshoots of August: Osage County seem to be popping up everywhere. What I got instead was a play packed to the seams with crude, to-the-point humor and an ironic nonchalance about just about anything and anything depraved: drugs, teens getting pregnant and running away from home, a family snorting coke like it’s no big deal.

When Carol , a lawyer, wife, and mother of a fifteen-year-old prep school student, with college loans still to pay off, no life insurance, and a husband in academia who makes twelve thousand dollars a year falls unexpectedly and fatally ill, she must find a way to be sure that her family will be financially secure after her death. She asks her husband Michael and her best friend Katy to get married so that they can jointly provide for Teddy, and they oblige. Bonding over sexual fantasy that quickly blooms into love, Michael’s idea for a lucrative family business takes a page (maybe a little too directly) from Weeds. Cleanly directed by May Adrales (who stepped up to the plate playing the role of Katy at the performance I saw), The Bereaved succeeds most noticeably in its grasp of the awkward brand of humor. Actors, director and playwright get the audience to laugh heartily at things that really shouldn’t be funny, yet they are, if only for the rules of schadenfreude.

The Bereaved does often ring with an absurdity that promotes a rather unbalanced sense of humor. It’s not quite a mockery of the characters, but often sets them up for jokes a bit too obviously. It’s reigned in by the director’s injection of an overall disparate feeling. The sense of distance she has created between the characters, the places and the events does highlight, if not overtly, the lack of emotional connectivity between these people. And perhaps that’s the problem. Though the play is undeniably laugh-out-loud funny with a lot of weight in its topics, there’s not much in the way of substance. What we get instead of much feeling is a domino effect presentation of one calamity after another that eventually approaches absurdity that is no longer enjoyable but merely ridiculous.

Though I was still laughing by the time The Bereaved immoderately pushed the fine line of having taken funny too far, my interest was lost. There’s much to be said for a finessed sense of humor, which Bradshaw clearly has, but his play lacks balance: I wanted to feel more than I did for a young boy losing his mother. The moment was wrenching, but the laughter still lingering throughout the house from the previous scene overshadowed it.

Overall, though, snappy dialogue and all around solid performances make most of the hour and ten minutes fly by. However, it’s a play that presents something of a catch-22, as it is enjoyable largely because it is so funny, and more seriousness would hinder the laughter. It’s hard to tell whether Bradshaw was aiming for overpowering laughs or a balance of humor as well as the other more realistically appropriate emotions. It’s too bad it couldn’t be toned down some, and given a little more authenticity, which brings me back to those Oreos. If you set out to make something look real, you’d better check that the cookies actually come from the store advertised on the bag you’re unpacking.

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‘kul: That Sounds Cool/Aaron Riccio/September 10, 2009

Considering that Thomas Bradshaw has previously tackled slavery and alcoholism, his latest bit of exaggerated theater, The Bereaved, is rather unambitious. Sure, American families are increasingly callous and disconnected units, but why bother telling us this? (Telling is the wrong word: Bradshaw’s overt playwriting is really just a good, long cathartic yell.) Then again, why not? The shocksploitation of familiar territory can be entertaining (as Brian Parks showed in last year’s The Invitation), especially when it’s uninhibitedly directed by someone like May Adrales. (We got your nudity right here!)

Things start simply enough, as Michael (Andrew Garman) and Carol (McKenna Kerrigan) suddenly roar at one another over the chores neither one of them do, but this is just a red herring, as is their subsequent squabble over how to address the large amounts of semen Carol’s found in their son Teddy’s (Vincent Madero) underwear. But these slices of life are just minor bits of dysfunction, and Bradshaw, as an impishly maximal offender, is after bigger game. Sure enough, our expectations are upset when, instead of flipping out, Carol merely notes Michael’s ungainly mound of cocaine, taking a few snorts herself as Michael quotes from a sex column. It’s the sort of creepy normality that Bradshaw does so well, an effect that’s compounded by Carol’s abrupt heart attack, and Michael’s choice to hide the cocaine before dialing 9-1-1.

Without giving the surprises away (since that’s all Bradshaw has, here), the rest of the show revolves around Carol’s desire that Michael–a lowly paid adjunct professor–marry her best friend, Katy (KK Moggie), for financial support. This turns out not to be a problem, as Katy’s seen Michael checking out her spandex-clad ass (he wants to lick the crack from ass to tailbone) and as Michael is all-too-willing to satisfy Katy’s rape fantasy (even if that means going in blackface). Meanwhile, Teddy jumps into a relationship with his schoolmate Melissa (Jenny Seastone Stern), whom he soon accidentally impregnates (he can’t come while wearing a condom). In turn, Melissa, with her rock-star mentality and fifteen-year-old idealism, decides to keep the baby, so long as she can still get her cocaine from the suave Jamal (Brian D. Coats).

Bradshaw speedily delivers all this (and more) with a rapid series of plot- and comic-heavy scenes. It’s somewhat refreshing to dispense with subtext and simply say “Get an abortion” or to just segue from Michael pounding away at Katy to then show a sickly satisfied Carol in her hospital bed, drifting off. The lack of hidden facets to the characters doesn’t diminish the surprising effect of seeing the characters actually doing what they’re talking about, and the spry physicality that Adrales captures is what keeps us laughing.

And so long as you’re fine with surface-level laughs, The Bereaved satisfies. But just as quickly as Michael remarries–the day after Carol’s funeral–so too is Bradshaw’s show forgotten. That such extreme images can be so quickly buried says a lot about how empty the show really is.

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Village Voice/Eric Grode/September 15, 2009

In The Bereaved, the prolific provocateur Thomas Bradshaw turns his acid-filled pen to an oddly perky spoof of . . . of what, exactly? The women’s-picture weepies of the 1930s, with their deathbed promises? After-school specials, with their leaden pedagogy? Edgy-family cable dramas of the Weeds variety, with their haywire moral compasses?
This thematic limbo may account for the tentative quality of much of this episodic yarn, which centers on the dying wishes of a career woman and the efforts of her surviving family members to follow them, or at least the fun ones. The flouted taboos that have practically—and reductively—come to define Bradshaw’s work pop up again (rape fantasies and blackface this time), but he and director May Adrales too often give the sense of aiming less for jarring insight and more for stage-managed shock value.

Bradshaw appears to be smirking out of one side of his mouth (eliciting cheap, albeit occasionally successful, laughs at grisly subject matter) and frowning judgmentally out of the other (cutting abruptly from sexcapades to scenes of the abandoned, dying mother). If you don’t laugh, the message appears to be, “You’re square”; if you do, you’re worse.

On Off Broadway/Matt Windman/September 10, 2009

This thematic limbo may account for the tentative quality of much of this episodic yarn, which centers on the dying wishes of a career woman and the efforts of her surviving family members to follow them, or at least the fun ones. The flouted taboos that have practically—and reductively—come to define Bradshaw’s work pop up again (rape fantasies and blackface this time), but he and director May Adrales too often give the sense of aiming less for jarring insight and more for stage-managed shock value.

Bradshaw appears to be smirking out of one side of his mouth (eliciting cheap, albeit occasionally successful, laughs at grisly subject matter) and frowning judgmentally out of the other (cutting abruptly from sexcapades to scenes of the abandoned, dying mother). If you don’t laugh, the message appears to be, “You’re square”; if you do, you’re worse.

–

The L Magazine/Dan Callahan/September 16, 2009

Thomas Bradshaw’s The Bereaved has an ominous title; surely we’re all more than a little tired of plays and movies about grief where actors go through the familiar stages of loss and weep copious tears every other scene or so. Those unfamiliar with Bradshaw’s work might be worried, in the first twenty minutes, that he’s actually rehashing the ancient plot about a dying woman who tries to set her husband up with a viable wife after her demise. Politically correct lawyer Carol (McKenna Kerrigan) has an unexpected heart attack, and she coolly aligns her slackerish, adjunct professor husband Michael (Andrew Garman) with her best friend Katy (KK Moggie) when she’s on her deathbed. It’s only when Michael and Katy are alone together that the real tone of the play emerges; she urges him to share a sexual fantasy with her, and when he does, it’s fairly mild. When she tells him her much more far-out, violent and racially pointed sex fantasy, The Bereaved (which continues at the Wild Project through September 26) shifts into a confident farce that keeps spinning merrily like a top until it winds down and finishes unexpectedly and inconclusively, like an improvisation that has run its course.

Bradshaw is known as a provocateur, but this play isn’t likely to really offend anyone, unless we’re dealing with an audience member who is instantly upset by certain words and actions. Garman and Moggie have to engage in some fairly explicit sexual activity, but you never feel uncomfortable for them, as you sometimes do for actors in other plays (Adam Rapp, I’m looking at you). As Michael’s strait-laced son Teddy, Vincent Madero has two graphic, awkward humping sessions with his girlfriend Melissa (Jenny Seastone Stern), both of which are played comically, which takes the edge off of them. The play is best in the clothed scenes between Madero and Stern because they both have crack deadpan comic timing; both get big laughs just by saying simple declarative sentences with a total lack of affect and conviction (as a bonus, Madero does a classic spit take at one point).

The audience at The Bereaved all seemed to be having a terrific time, as if they were elderly matrons at a Neil Simon hit, and that’s because the play is “offensive” but never truly out for blood. It’s only after it’s over that you realize how dark a piece it could be; this is basically a comic dissection of the disasters that await you when you give in to your most indulgent impulses. It isn’t perfect; I could have done without the extended shout-out to Jamie Bufalino’s reliably god-awful sex column in Time Out New York. But The Bereaved is a play that might change according to its audience; clearly, Bradshaw’s work has some serious underpinnings that could be drawn out on a different night, or even in a different production. For all its flaws, I can’t get it out of my head, and there’s no doubt that it comes from a talented and original new voice in the theater.