On stage, Victor Esses exudes an easy, open warmth. On screen, his long-lost great aunt Marcelle oozes sly wit and elegance. You can tell they would both be a delight at a dinner party.
But this hour in their company is an uneven one, and The Death and Life of All of Us still feels like a work in progress. In Esses’ sincere performance, which asks what narratives we tell of ourselves, he traces the roots of his own identity through Marcelle’s extraordinary journey from Lebanon to Italy. But where the beginnings of stories and encounters are offered, the middles and ends are too often left out, no momentum pushing us on. The disparate threads remain so, and this story of connection never quite connects.
Recordings Esses made of his great aunt fill the back of the theatre, overlapping and spilling out on to the walls. She was clearly a remarkable woman, intensely glamorous with her jewelled earrings, big grin and perfectly coiffed hair. Alongside snippets of his own life, Esses reveals some of Marcelle’s complexities: how she converted from Judaism to Catholicism for her husband and hid her heritage from her children.
Her clips are the heart of the show, but the fragmented storytelling around them is sometimes hard to follow. Marcelle’s occasionally evasive answers are never the issue; her reticence to give away her secrets only deepens her character. Instead, Esses’ attempt at conjuring an air of philosophic mystery too often tips over into a lack of clarity. It’s unfortunate that some projections are too faint to see clearly, and in several crucial moments, the scrolling captions are so hard to read that numerous audience members whisper the fast-moving words to their friends who are straining to see.
The sound, though, is stunning. Beside Esses, and below Marcelle, sits Enrico Aurigemma. Throughout the performance, he plays guitar with a loop pedal, his swooning score sometimes tender, sometimes dark. One motif Esses plays with is a dance move haltingly performed, hastily stopped, his body not quite finding the right way to be. As the show draws to its end, Aurigemma pulls Esses through to the conclusion. The movements finally piece together and there’s a sense of things just beginning to fit into place.
