The five characters of Des Moines-Dan, a taxi driver, and Marta, his cancer-stricken wife (played by Arliss Howard and Johanna Day) Jimmy, their wheelchair-bound granddaughter, who until recently has been their grandson (Hari Nef) Mrs. He sees the reality of the Bible as a myth, and the reality of life as an enormous discrepancy from that myth. He states: “I’m saying the mystery of death, of the sudden prospect of death, well… there’s very little you can say.

Not the death to come, but the death I was before I lived.” Despite his Catholicism, Father Michael refuses to make a comforting prediction about one of the character’s coming demise. Father Michael says something very similar: “I find myself mourning the eternity of my death. He chuckled a little bit, sipped his Coke, and then told me he thought death was on both sides of life, and that life seemed to be just a brief interruption. One of the characters, Father Michael, a hard-drinking priest who likes to accentuate his face with lipstick, eye shadow, and rouge, speaks a few lines, not unlike what Denis once spoke to me back when I was his editor at Esquire many years ago and we were talking at an Italian restaurant about the possibility of an afterlife. There’s no more vivid, comic, tragic, and mesmerizing theatrical version of this fallen world than his final play Des Moines, now premiering in Brooklyn at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, produced by The Theater for a New Audience, founded by Jeffrey Horowitz in 1979.

The Esquire Book Club Holiday Gift Guide.

Tree of smoke johnson