The Correspondent
Opening Night: February 13, 2014
Closing: March 16, 2014
Theater: Rattlestick Theatre
A grieving husband hires a dying woman to deliver a message to his recently deceased wife in the afterlife. When he receives letters describing events that only his wife could know, he must determine if the correspondence is from a con artist or if his wife has returned from the grave.
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February 13, 2014
A guilty mind is fertile ground for psychological intrigue. Writer Ken Urban deserves credit for recognizing that in The Correspondent, a 90-minute drama that strives to be a taut thriller. But it comes up slack. Set in Boston, the action follows Philip Graves (Thomas Jay Ryan), a big-shot attorney. He is haunted because he may have had an unwitting role in the death of his wife, Charlotte. The heavy burden keeps him up at night — and compels him to chuck common sense — and to browse the Internet.
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February 14, 2014
Short stories are rich resource material for plays. But Ken Urban’s new play, The Correspondent, would make a better short story. The plot is concise and spooky: a man mourning his dead wife pays a terminally ill woman to deliver a message to his departed soulmate, who would rather have this conversation in person. It’s precisely the kind of suggestive story that stirs the imagination to visualize the specifics. But as an all-too-tangible stage play (and all-too-literally directed and enacted), the material loses all its mystery and lays bare its utter lack of logic.
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February 13, 2014
Do you believe in ghosts? What about the afterlife? Chances are, after a viewing of Ken Urban’s unsettling drama The Correspondent, now receiving its world premiere at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, you’ll be left questioning many of your deeply held beliefs. This sublimely disorienting production from director Stephen Brackett (Buyer & Cellar) is so disturbing because it is grounded in stark reality. You might feel like you’ve entered the Twilight Zone…only with full-frontal male nudity.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 15, 2014
Ken Urban’s The Correspondent, a spooky but curiously unsatisfying mélange of ghost story tropes with some modern, androgynous tweaking, plays like a pervier version of the 1990 film Ghost. Both feature an African-American medium, streetwise and possibly shady, who helps a person in grief try to will a deceased party back into existence (though Whoopi Goldberg’s Oda Mae Brown is definitely more fun) as well as a third-party interloper whose creepy identity is slowly revealed. Unlike Ghost’s oddly delicate balancing act, however, Urban’s challenging yet patchy Off Broadway play never finds a confident rhythm.
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February 18, 2014
Technology hurtles forward, spinning off new surprises by the year, but I’ve not yet heard that emails can be sent from beyond the grave. This startling concept is among the many oddities of The Correspondent, a psychological drama by Ken Urban that shovels on the preposterous twists in depicting the desperation of a widower trying to make contact with his dead wife.
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