Show: 25
Title: The Importance of Living
Category: Comedy / Drama / Horror
By: Mermaid Productions
Written by: Tim Uren
Location: Open Eye Theatre
Summary: Two happy murderers meet on death row, or maybe the afterlife, and share stories of their crimes.
Highlights: This sounds like a dark premise for a play, and it is, but it's also delightfully fun. We meet one of the murderers (Ariel Pinkerton) on death row in 1940s California, eating her last meal and reading her last book (the philosophy book The Importance of Living). She also gets to summon someone for her last conversation - a murderer from London (Tim Uren) who doesn't know he died over 40 years ago. Both married multiple times in their lives, with each spouse dying mysteriously, and leaving them a little better off. She (I apologize, I'm not good with names in general and after 25 shows I cannot remember these characters' names from last night) has the upper hand in the situation because she has studied his criminal case, and knows he eventually hangs for his crimes, so she continually points out his lies. These are people with hard lives (she in the American South in the Depression era, he in late 19th Century England), who did what they had to to survive, although they took it a little to far. Ariel and Tim make these characters almost likable, or at least entertaining. There are a lot of names thrown around in these stories that are a bit hard to keep track of (names are hard, as previously mentioned), but we get the general gist of things in this dark, creepy, time jumping dramedy.