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End Days
Sylvia Stein has her own personal Jesus. Seriously: Jesus stays by her side, offers a comforting hand and occasionally fetches Starbucks. If this sounds like the setup for another lazy bashing of evangelical beliefs, that’s not quite right—Sylvia’s goth, atheist teenage daughter gets spiritual advice from physicist Stephen Hawking, who manifests himself when she gets high.
Juilliard grad Laufer’s 2007 play traffics in weighty themes of faith and religion, and she puts some sharp observations into her characters’ mouths. But her compulsion to cut those astringent matters with broad strokes of whimsy—a tendency that seems to have become a common crutch among graduates of the country’s most influential playwriting programs—works against her.
End Days takes place some months after September 11; the new uncertainty has splintered the Stein family. An unwaveringly optimistic misfit teen, whose daily attire is a bedazzled Elvis jumpsuit, insinuates himself into the broken Stein family, putting them on the path to mending. He could be a new archetype: the Magical Nerd-o.
On an unnervingly raked stage (designer Andre LaSalle literalizing the Steins’ collective vertigo), Murray’s talented cast injects color into Laufer’s work; Laura T. Fisher’s shaded intonations of “thank you, Jesus” are tiny gifts. But Laufer’s characters are written too cartoonishly to truly connect; all we hear is the author’s voice. That won’t make believers out of us.
