Ben
Brantley

October 18, 2015

Corpses freshly risen from their graves aren’t usually as cozy as Her, the narrator in “Underneath,” a solo performance piece by Pat Kinevane that wears death as if it were a quilted dressing gown. True, she — I mean, Her — looks every inch a fright when she first clambers out of her crypt. She is, after all, in an advanced state of putrefaction, and her rotting skin and clothes are the color of carbon. But unlike the brain-eating undead who lumber through film and television these days, Her just wants to chat. She has a story to tell about a life shaped and destroyed by deformity, beauty and cruelty. Of course there will be many detours — into jokes, satirical re-enactments of reality television shows, and chin wags with audience members — before she calls it a night. Her may be deceased, but she’s also Irish, and it takes more than not being alive to stop a garrulous Gaelic tongue. “Underneath,” which opened on Sunday night at the Irish Arts Center (and in Hell’s Kitchen, wouldn’t you know?), is an amiably meandering diversion for those who regard Halloween as a time for embracing the ghosts we run from the rest of the year. Mr. Kinevane, whose equally sepulchral “Silent” was seen in New York in 2012, is a monologuist of untrammeled imagination, who loves to ferret out the poetic glitter in dark, dank corners.