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Breathing Corpses
It’s a mean trick, really. The five out-of-sequence scenes in Laura Wade’s clever dread-mystery Breathing Corpses fit together like the large, chunky pieces in a harmless jigsaw puzzle for infants. Once you’ve assembled them, however, the doomsday picture you see is grisly enough to make adults look away. Like Schnitzler’s La Ronde with murder where the sex should be, Wade ties a daisy chain of tangentially related encounters into a single loop, showing us that the average joe’s subconscious despair is knotted up in everybody else’s. (Imagine a chart tracing how a virus gets transmitted from stranger to stranger, only with angst.) And yet in this brisk Steep production, director Robin Witt handles the material by young British scribe Wade the way British mysteries are best delivered: tart and lively, even with all the dead bodies lying about.
We first encounter a welcome stereotype; Julia Siple is keen as usual, playing a plucky chambermaid with low self-esteem who discovers a dead body in one of her rooms. (It gets her down, doncha know, because it seems like she’s the only girl on staff who ever finds cadavers on the job.) But in the next scene, Wade’s comic voice subsides with a look into the domestic life of a man panicked by the putrid stench wafting from one of the storage units he rents out, and uglier still when the play then cuts to a violent squabble between a yuppie couple (dynamic work from Jonathan Edwards and Lucy Carapetyan) whose weekend routine has been shattered when they discover a murdered girl’s body in the park. The playwright then winds us back to where we started, demonstrating en route how laughs, terror and grief often grow from the same root. With nary an underqualified actor, and a creepily impersonal wrap-around aluminum-siding set from Marcus Stephens, Steep takes us on a journey that’s also something of a trip.
