Rita (Cornelia Hart) and Iris (Wendy Wilmer). Photo: Franc Rosario.
Spooky Action’s latest play, a premiere from Christine Evans in the altogether sublime Women’s Voices Theater Festival, has plenty of elements that could show up in a good horror movie: a patient trapped in a hospital, losing her grip on reality, visited regularly by a man who very much seems to be the devil. But the always interesting (if somewhat uneven) Can’t Complain is a lot more subtle in it’s questioning of reality than all that. Rita (a resolute Cornelia Hart) is confined to a hospital ward following a stroke, and while she wants nothing more than to return home as ever-stranger events are unfolding around her, she’s not a scream queen gripped by panic or a heroine leading adrenaline-pumping escape attempts. The horror of Can’t Complain is a lot less obvious, and a good deal more insidious, than that.
The problem is that Rita, still recovering from her brain-damaging incident, doesn’t realize how much is amiss. Her entire existence is confined to a calculatedly boring, washed out grey hospital room (designed by Luciana Stecconi). Rita has no reliable sign of time passing, or even an easy way to differentiate between night and day, other than the visits from cleaners, nurses, or family. All ask how she’s doing (a question with a generally-obvious answer, when asked to someone confined in a hospital), to which she just as emptily replies “can’t complain” before, in fact, diving in to a long list of complaints.
But the complaints that she harangues her constantly-harried daughter Maureen (Tonya Beckman) and granddaughter Jansis (Nicole Ruthmarie)—the long waiting, the lack of privacy—aren’t nearly as alarming as the aspects she glosses over: visits from the devil, short term memory loss, and her apparently-imagined roommate, Iris (played with a wonderful, cackling brogue by Wendy Wilmer), who materializes in tattered clothes and piles of trash in the next bed over in a matter of seconds, and can back vanish into a clean, neatly made bed just as quickly.
The confusing landscape that Rita obliviously embraces as normal is what sets the play apart from the typical losing-my-mind tropes that come up so frequently in sci fi (“am I trapped in a hologram?”) or soaps (“was it all just a dream?”). The audience views the world through the eyes of a character that has no idea know how far gone she is, which mirrors the tragedy and pain faced by anyone who has seen a loved one fall to a similar fate.
But Rita’s ability to accept an ever-stranger world also saps the play of a lot of it’s energy: Rita’s room contains a few clever tricks, but overall, her insistence on suffering through her confinement with a stiff upper lip makes the whole situation feel more like sitting patiently in a waiting room than trapped in a hospital; sure, she’d rather not be there, but the need for escape never quite feels urgent, dire.
Though the stakes are low, some competent directing on the part of Michael Bloom, and a host of good performances on display, makes Can’t Complain a solidly spooky, if not outright chilling, entry in the Women’s Voices Theater Festival.
Can’t Complain runs at Spooky Action Theater through October 25. Tickets ($25-35) are available online.
