Ben
Brantley

March 17, 2015

Everybody knows that life ends in death. And for much of our waking hours, we do our best to push this awareness to the very back of our minds. There are times, though, when such kindly amnesia isn’t possible. And then everything we look at is suddenly and abruptly heightened by the sense that existence is defined by extinction. “The Evening,” Richard Maxwell’s beautiful new play at the Kitchen, takes place in the glare of such illumination. Mr. Maxwell, who in his late 40s is perhaps the greatest American experimental theater auteur of his generation, was working on this play as his father was dying. And “The Evening” begins with a first-person prologue, read by Cammisa Buerhaus, that describes his father’s last days, hours and minutes. Some of this introduction is an unvarnished account of that period that will be familiar to anyone who has held vigil at a death bed: an itemizing of pills and paraphernalia, time-inverting schedules, struggling half-conversations and those final assertions of strength that we read with pathetic hope as victories of the will to live.