Standby Process

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Starring Greg Dean, Patricia Duran, and Paul Menzel
Directed by Jason Nodler

Please join us for a very limited run of Wallace Shawn's fiercely urgent, frighteningly prescient masterwork, The Designated Mourner, a special, off-season addition for those that need it.

The Catastrophic Theatre previously staged The Designated Mourner in 2010, in a production The Houston Chronicle called a “quietly stunning realization.” Although it takes place in an unspecified time and place, its themes are immensely timely especially right now, and Catastrophic Theatre artistic director Jason Nodler decided to offer a limited run of the play as a necessary add-on to the current season. Greg Dean as Jack and Paul Menzel as Howard return from the 2010 cast and are joined by Patricia Duran (Middletown, The Pine) as Judy.

Through a series of intertwining, confessional monologues, three characters reveal the harrowing details of an unnamed country in the near future in which a popular uprising has deemed the arbiters of high culture to be enemies of the state and targeted them for execution. Following Jack (“a former student of English literature who went downhill from there”), his wife Judy, and her revered yet controversial writer father Howard, the play explores love, sex, morality, the idea of “the self,” the struggle between high and low culture, and what it means to designate groups of people as “enemies.” In many ways, it’s a simple play—just three people talking to the audience and sometimes to each other—but it contains almost indescribable beauty, heartache, and release. And in light of the present state of the world, it feels more urgent than ever before.

Nodler, who calls The Designated Mourner his favorite piece of writing for the theatre from the last fifty years, notes: “This is not a play that chooses sides with regard to American politics, but it does speak to the unprecedented division in our country between the haves and have-nots, and it is more relevant today than any time since it was written. The day after the divisive election season came to its end, at least five people contacted me asking that we bring this play back now. None of them could have known I was already halfway there myself. It will be tough adding an off-season play to be performed almost immediately, so why are we doing this at this moment? It has something to do with ‘the fierce urgency of now.’ It is truly a masterwork, a play about, well, everything—an enormous story told with such intelligence and generosity, and somehow told so simply and with such economy, an almost impossible thing of beauty. Since it was published in 1996 I have frequently, repeatedly, gathered friends together to read it aloud late at night.

Certainly, for anyone who cares about the future of culture (or civilization or whatever you care to call it), The Designated Mourner is a must.