Playwright: Cathy Earnest. At: Redtwist Theatre, 1044 W. Bryn Mawr. Tickets: 773-728-7529; www.redtwist.org; $30 Thurs., $35 Fri.-Sun. Runs through: Oct. 19
The horrifying events of 9/11 have been seared into our collective consciousness in a myriad of ways for well over a decade. Another Bone, currently featured at the Redtwist Theatre, manages, rather surprisingly, to present us with a fresh, vivid and deeply moving perspective on the trauma of 9/11 while deftly avoiding the ruts, clichés and sentimentalism that another show on this now well-worn theme could easily display.
Everyone who has experienced grief knows it's an emotion that can sneak up on you and knock you sideways. Playwright Cathy Earnest offers an exploration of the nuances of grief that contrasts the extraordinary circumstances of losing a loved one in our most spectacular national tragedy with the grief of losing a loved one far from the glare of the media spotlight.
Five years after 9/11, Marie has accepted the death of her fireman husband Joe, and is moving on with her life, settled in her career and content in her role as mother to Joe's son Ned and wife to new husband Frank, an architect. She has a best friend in Rhonda, who is also a fireman's widow. Then Joe's newly identified bones begin arriving by FedEx, one at a time, from the New York medical examiner's office. The macabre physical reality of Joe's piecemeal, partial skeleton shows us how mercilessly grief can reignite. We witness the unraveling of Marie's life and even her sanity, thanks to these graphic, relic-like shards of her dead husband. Her bizarre predicament is further complicated by the manic prodding of a woman who claims that a clerical error has mixed up the bones of her husband with Marie's.
Rhonda struggles to help Marie, urging her not to keep the growing pile of bones a secret from her current husband. "He wouldn't want you to be going through this by yourself," she advises sympathetically. But Marie, in her anguish, doesn't see the point of telling him. "He likes to design things, arrange things, fix things. Move a wall to make a closet. Embed the cabinet to make a wider hall. What is fixable here? Can he rearrange any of this into a better design?"
Jacqueline Grandt turns in a tour-de-force performance as Marie. She conveys the rawness of Marie's pain with an authenticity that is gripping to witness. Jan Ellen Graves is excellent as Rhonda, who attempts to be Marie's friend despite her own loss and perplexity. Justin Burns plays Marie's son Ned with a much-needed grounding energy for the other characters. Stephanie, the slightly off-kilter, mysterious widow who turns up at Marie's door, is played deftly by Annie Pritchard.
In Redtwist's intimate theater-in-the-round setting, with minimal stage props, the starkness of the characters' emotions is amplified, and the playwright wisely knows what to leave out as well as what to spell out. The result is a truly moving drama that forcefully demonstrates that grief has no hierarchies and few rules.