"Fifteen years ago I killed my sister." You can't say that the unnamed narrator of Adam Rapp's meditation on grief and guilt doesn't get straight to the point. If only he would stay there. Nothing is ever quite so gripping in this meandering, self-consciously lyrical one-man show than that simple opening sentence.
The speaker is now 32, a failed writer and former piano prodigy. Aged 17, he decapitated his nine-year old sister in a suburban car accident, simultaneously snuffing out a life and killing, as he sees it, the American Dream. His grief-stricken mother retreats into madness, his father tries to kill him, and the narrator flees to a lonely life in New York where he works in a bookstore, builds himself tables made out of copies of great American classics by Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and loses himself in words.
Rapp certainly piles on the words. There are so many similes tottering on top of metaphors that you think that the entire thing might just sink under the sheer weight of fine writing. At night the shadow of the sycamore tree "hangs on my bedroom window like an enormous man trembling". Crowds rise in a "schizophrenic cloud". His sister's skull "gleamed with a kind of lunar sorrow". On and on it goes. The effect of all this literariness is to drain the life and pain out of the story.
Peter McDonald gives a superb performance, his hands constantly fluttering as if trying to ward off the past, but there seems no compelling reason why this is presented in a theatre, rather than between the covers of a novella. The overall effect is of something distanced rather than heart-breaking.
