"The K of D": a haunting, intriguing one-woman show

Theater review |

Laura Schellhardt's "The K of D" has a gothic insularity that feels like collective and escalating madness. One feels as if the audience is being dragged down a rabbit hole of psychological horror, with fewer and fewer ordinary bearings as shadows grow so deep we glimpse the juncture where darkness and magic meet.

Spooky, indeed, and all the more so because "The K of D" ("the kiss of death") is told in a way that intentionally raises doubts as to its partial or whole veracity. Through its tormented, central figure's simultaneously painful and playful monologue about the difference between facts and truth, Schellhardt provocatively explores the role of creativity in emotional survival.

The remarkable Renata Friedman plays a girl-woman we assume to be Charlotte McGraw, who possesses an ostracizing if useful ability to bestow death with a loving gesture.

The character weaves stories around Charlotte in the third person, though, either literally or literarily, she is clearly her own subject.

Clambering about a rustic dock where Charlotte's abusive father has been known to go fishing, the haunted heroine tells a long story she suggests could be real or an ever-evolving urban legend of oblique validity. In any case, it involves the death of Charlotte's twin brother, Jamie, and his possible reincarnation as a heron.

Also in the mix is Faulknerian decay in the McGraw family, and an unholy war that breaks out when the psychopath responsible for Jamie's killing moves next door to the McGraws.

It is Friedman alone playing all these people, and more. Friedman plays a meta-Charlotte who, as storyteller, invokes the voices, mannerisms, emotions and unique mania of each individual in her tale. Director Braden Abraham proves a superb traffic cop helping Friedman keep each role clearly delineated.

Describing Friedman's cracked-mirror performance as virtuoso is hardly adequate, especially since she isn't simply stepping out of one character into another but rapidly yanking feverish impressions from Charlotte — an identity she won't even embrace.

In its chilling ending, "The K of D" suggests this cursed narrator is doomed to tell and retell these (truly or figuratively) autobiographical events in an endless loop, making storytelling not so much catharsis as living hell.

Tom Keogh: tomwkeogh@yahoo.com