"The Toaster": Death, a family's journey

The woman wants to get it right. She has brought detailed notes to refer to, a shopping list, maps. She strategizes and prioritizes. She scrupulously searches for the words to express her every thought and concern precisely.

But death has a way of messing up even the best-laid plans, as noted Seattle author Rebecca Brown's humorous, tender first play, "The Toaster," reminds us.

It also has a way of teaching us how to grieve and go on — when we'd really rather not.

The woman called only "A" is the chattiest of the three relations in "Toaster," premiering at On the Boards under the direction of John Kazanjian and his New City Theater.

As portrayed in clenched detail by Mary Ewald, she's also a compulsive, purse-clutching, irritable control-freak. One whose final visit with her dying mother, "C" (Susan Corzatte), is mainly spent bickering with her younger brother "D" (Timothy Hyland).

"A" is a figure of the ridiculous, in a setup that owes much to such absurdist-leaning dramatists as Edward Albee. ("The Toaster" takes place on a park bench, similar to the one in Albee's "The Zoo Story.")

But to Brown's great credit, "A" is also claimed by her family, and therefore by us. Most poignantly, she is understood by her mother, who asks little of her grown children in a final reunion other than to "Sit with me. Wait with me."

Looking so convincingly wan and frail you worry for her, Corzatte gives an utterly touching performance of few words, but deep ones. When she begs Hyland's affable but put-upon "D" to love his bossy sister, and remember that losses have made her difficult, she seems to be speaking for all parents everywhere.

Fine storyteller that she is, Brown drops hints around about a family past of shared pleasures and hardships: an absent father who appears to have died young, long-gone childhood pets — much of this remembered differently, by different witnesses.

There are many laughs of recongition here. But they don't undermine the heartbreaking passage that ends the first part of "The Toaster," with "D" easing his mother through the "good death" she wishes for. A quiet death, with a pretty nightgown and a fresh white sheet and a someone there to ease the loneliness.

If "The Toaster" had ended with this simple, beautifully realized pas de deux (which involves a few moments of unsalacious nudity), "The Toaster" would be a gem of a one-act.

Brown presses on though, to bring back "A," and lead her through a thicket of guilt and fear to her own acceptance of a mother's passing and her brother's comfort.

This is where "The Toaster" (the title refers to one of two sweetly prosaic objects the siblings inherit) bogs down and edges into sentimentality.

A more compact, single-act play, with a less protracted resolution, is advised.

But the spirit of the piece, the sensitive acting and staging, Brown's admirable command of language and family psychodynamics, and her fearless sense of humor, make "The Toaster" a fine first theatrical effort for the author.

Here and in her other work, Brown is that rare writer who proves the G.B. Shaw axiom: "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."

Misha Berson: mberson@seattletimes.com