The show opens on a subdued parlor scene, with all the actors standing detached from one another, drifting drearily around the stage like fish in a bowl. Their small mundane actions -- turning on a record, sipping a glass of wine -- take on the tremendous weight of some unexplained tragedy. So powerful is this sense of unspoken woe that it is not until about seven or eight minutes into the show that the first phrase of dialogue is spoken, and several more minutes until the second. With painstaking slowness, it is gradually made apparent that the characters are gathered at a wake for a recently deceased friend. At one point, a character approaches the dead man's widow and mumbles "everybody is empathizing," although, from the looks of it, they are all so isolated in their own prisons of grief that they might as well not be aware of each other's presence.
But even this brief description does not communicate the surreal detachment of the show, which deliberately removes itself from reality in the attempt of a more complex perspective on its subject matter. This is the kind of show where nobody says anything for five minutes -- then, without warning or provocation, someone kicks over a table in misery and still no one reacts. "Kommer" is a work built on silence, in which the smallest physical movement is meant to communicate volumes of unspoken emotion. The cast brings new meaning to the term "underplaying;" one has the impression that the actors were left out in the sun until every last drop of emotive capacity had evaporated, leaving behind only sad empty husks.
Of course, there is some comic relief. Taking advantage of the heightened reality of the play, the actors do things like sprinkle potting soil in each others' hair or stick pieces of tape all over their faces -- small absurd gestures that both lighten the otherwise morbid tone and add to the sense of surrealism. But even the few moments of comedy are played in such a deadpan style that they seem stolen from a Wes Anderson film: the overall mood remains repressively grim and joyless almost to a fault. After about 45 minutes of this plotless dreamlike atmosphere, I began to wonder if "Kommer" was nothing more than an interminable display of catharsis, without any hope of closure for its grief-stricken characters.
But then, just when I thought that "Kommer" could not get any more distant from reality, the actors all walked offstage and a movie screen appeared showing them bowing to the applause of an unseen audience. Jarred but awakened by this sudden change of medium, I watched as the filmed versions of the actors went backstage and discussed how they thought that the show had gone quite well that evening. The film shows them leaving the dressing room and going their own separate ways, back to their various day jobs. The actress who had played the dead man's wife drives to an airport, dons a flight attendant's uniform and is seen serving drinks to passengers on a plane. Another actor leaves the theater to work as a traffic cop at a nearby intersection. Another goes home and makes himself a cup of tea. But, as one might anticipate, surrealism begins to intrude on the actors' "real" lives as well. One woman takes a fire extinguisher into a public bathroom, and serenely uses it to smash-in the toilet seat. A man is seen professing romantic love to a goat. You get the picture.
The filmed half of the show is slightly less successful than the staged half. Its point, presumably, is to show that that the relationship between grief and loneliness extends beyond the confines of the play, but the detachment from reality doesn't play as well in the context of real life as it does onstage. Yet when the lights went up and the real actors came back onto the stage for a live curtain call, I felt strangely enriched for having seen "Kommer," almost in spite of myself. As performance art, it's not fun or even particularly enjoyable, but then, how could any artistic examination of grief and loneliness be anything but joyless? With all its minimalism and restraint, "Kommer" left me feeling mesmerized, fascinated and, yes, even a little sad -- not for the characters, who aren't intended to exist in any believable reality, but for the human condition of grief, which the show portrays with painful accuracy.
