Theater Review: Dying City Is An Intense Look At Trauma
We are our stories, and, for those that have suffered a trauma, such a tragic story can feel like the only one ever told about you. Our traumas are inevitably defining, but do not have to be our sole definition. Yet, tell that to the pain. Starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Colin Woodell, Dying City asks if you can ever really heal if you do not acknowledge who wounded you.
Written and directed by Christopher Shinn, the Second Stage production is intense. Wishing 90 minutes, you are hit with the sins and hurts of a dead man, Craig (played by Woodell), and are left to wonder if he is worth remembering by his ex-wife, Kelly (played By Winstead). In the beginning, especially in the first flashback, you see Craig as a victim of the Iraq War. A soldier that died for his country and left his wife and his identical twin, Peter (also played by Woodell) to ponder why he signed up to go back. He was getting his Harvard PHD on Faulkner, happily married, and eager to protect his little brother from his choices in boyfriends. Yet, as with any play/ life, there is more to the story.
Woodell is riveting as both Peter and Craig. With just a flip of his hair, a change of shirt, and a play on his voice, Woodell makes these identical twins feel worlds apart in personality. You feel the energy change while he enters the room as either Peter or Craig. Peter is bright, kind, and eager to connect with someone over his brother’s loss. For all his acclaim/ struggles as an actor, the suicide of his brother shrouds over his mind as a sole focus. Meanwhile, Craig is dark, brooding, judgmental, and struggling to feel remorse over his violation of women; a vicious truth that is revealed to Winstead’s Kelly after his death. While she thought she was mourning a husband that struggled to love himself and her, she was mourning a sexual predator.
Winstead plays Kelly with such a fractured heart to call it “broken” feels cheap. She is devastated by his loss, his lack of love for her, and, later, his utmost vitriol for women. She cannot seem to mend together what she thought she had with Craig versus what she really had with him, which is surprising considering she is a therapist. Yet, even doctors struggle to maintain their health. Annoyingly for her, Peter is relentless in his pursuit to make her his “mourning companion.” He is not willing to lose her, too, but, for her, everything that is Craig must go. This leaves both to wonder whether “Death” truly is the last story of a life. If anything, a passed life continues to make tales through the ones that live and remember them.
For many philosophers, forgetting is the true death, which makes trauma consistently alive.Thus in a little, NYC apartment, designed by Dane Laffrey, two loved ones must decide if they can or need to love each other if the person that linked them together was both gone and, in a way, unreal. Buy Tickets For Dying City By Clicking Here. Plays at 2nd Stage Theater, located on, 305 W. 43rd St., until June 30.
