Still, We're Here

My play, Still, We're Here is a study of grief. Structured much like Beckett's Waiting for Godot, it observes two people filling time in the face of a close inevitability that feels forever away. Two adults and one child relative wait for morticians to pick up the body of their newly deceased loved one as they grapple with the uncanny reality of no longer having this person with them. It watches the tension created by people coping differently from each other, unable to say how they truly feel, they deflect the weight through arguments, logistics, and acting in ways that from outside look incongruous, but in reality are the only actions that feel appropriate.

Still, We're Here takes place over the course of a single night. S has been asking C to move their portable bidet off the bathroom sink for months. Tonight, with a body in the room, becomes the night to bring it up. Unable to cope with the helplessness of the loss, the confusion, sadness, and rage projects itself onto anger about hygiene and bathroom appliances before crescendoing with:

This is what Freud would call displacement, allowing the anger to diverge from its true source onto a substitute object, and the release of anger so disproportionate to the real source of pain makes us laugh.

Here the tension that the comedy will break sees us facing mortality and the banality of our issues when compared to death. The laugh is what keeps us from falling in.