Postmortem, WNEP Theater Foundation, at the Playground. Inspired by our fascination with obituaries and the raw appeal of real lives, the WNEP Theater Foundation has found fresh fodder for improvisation. Each night a tight ensemble of seven performers takes a newspaper obituary and performs an hour-long characterization loosely based on that small amount of information. The real strength of this concept is that the actors give us more than just a hypothetical survey of one person’s life, also portraying characters who have no direct contact with the central figure to provide context and comedy. The atmosphere created for each of the decades represented (the 1920s through 1990s the night I attended, introduced by audio vignettes from each period) grounds the production, making it a comment on America’s history as well as that of the individual.
