A play about death row wrestles with meaning

[February 11, 2011]  NEW YORK (AP) -- Damon Robinson is literally a dead man walking in the play "When I Come to Die."

An inmate on death row in Indiana, he has been returned to his cell after somehow surviving the three-drug cocktail that was supposed to stop his heart. He should be dead.

Playwright Nathan Louis Jackson takes this juicy premise and then steers it into a subtle meditation on time and second chances, avoiding either sentimentality or overtly taking sides in the passionate debate over executions.

"For 10 years I waited in that cell and I didn't think about anything but dying," Robinson (a superb Chris Chalk) tells a kindly prison priest. "If I have to go back to waiting, I'll crack."

The five-character play opened Thursday night Off-Broadway at The Duke on 42nd Street, part of Lincoln Center Theater's LCT3 initiative devoted to showcasing emerging talent. Jackson, who previously wrote "Broke-ology," is teamed again with that play's director, Thomas Kail.

Jackson clearly has an excellent ear for dialogue and does not fall into the trap of overreaching, but it sometimes feels as though he hasn't reached enough. While setting a play on death row gives a playwright instant drama, good direction and wonderful acting often props up this script, which offers little more than achingly realistic character studies.

Given an unexpected lease on life, Robinson wonders how long his reprieve will last and looks for help from the inmate in the next cell (a sweet David Patrick Kelly), his sister (a moving Amanda Mason Warren) and the priest (a skittish Neal Huff).

None can really help: His neighbor, an amiable, emotionally stunted man who befriends cockroaches to stave off loneliness, is now next for lethal injection and wants help on drafting his final words. Robinson's sister comes to visit after years of silence, but she has an agenda. The priest has no answers to this "miracle."

Robinson is in limbo, between life and death. Chalk, who was on Broadway in "Fences," shows every side of the condemned inmate spectacularly -- in turns loving, sullen, crazed, menacing and charming.

Robinson's only release from the pressure is heartbreaking: He has piles of unopened letters he has written and mailed to his family; the letters were returned to the prison and now take up several boxes.

Each is a sort of time capsule that he treats with as much reverence as religious icon, even though he knows what's in them and they were never read by his family. Watching Chalk carefully wash his hands before handling them, slit one open and read it aloud is one of the most poignant elements of the play.

The airiness and sparseness of the script is echoed by Robin Vest's set. It, remarkably, has no bars. Instead, Vest has made the show feel claustrophobic by, counter-intuitively, opening up the black-box space.

Nothing separates the two death row cells but the two actors' skills, forcing them to hold conversations without making eye contact. A guard (Michael Balderrama) prowls the catwalks and Jill BC Du Boff's sound design includes muffled screams and clanging metal doors.

But if you want deep answers to the meaning of life and death, there are none here. Jackson's premise, a man given a second chance, seems to collapse into a simple lesson about how to let go.

[Associated Press; By MARK KENNEDY]

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