(Scroll down, there a 4 different lengths of this review! Right down to Twitter sized!)
In the beginning of The Last 15 Seconds, we hear a lovely soft, scattered percussion -- not so much played so much as the sound of people rhythmically colliding with instruments -- as we fade up on a young woman (Pam Patel) delivering a harrowing, stark monologue about attending a 2005 wedding in Jordan with her husband, whereupon he suicide bombed himself; he "detonated," as she devastatingly yet accurately puts it.
This is, essentially, the story of the play. Over the next 75 minutes, we will see this story again, and again, and see the stories before this story, and the stories after this story, and we will see the stories painted in different lights or refracted through different prisms of understanding. But each sketch, and everything therein, resonates back to this pivotal, defining explosion.
The titular last 15 seconds refer to a hypothetical conversation between the protagonists: suicide bomber Rawad Abed (Trevor Copp), and Syrian-American filmmaker Moustapha Akkad (Alan K. Sapp), who also died in the Jordan bombing. It's never much of a
conversation; Moustapha and Rawad, in the rare moments that they find themselves alone together onstage, don't particularly seem to like each other much (understandable), and thus there's not much opportunity for common ground.
The production tries, though, and the two men -- along with a chorus of three women, in an unspoken maiden/mother/crone trio -- delve into the subject matter with fearlessness, inventiveness, and the determination to search for meaning and reason following a tragedy that appears at times to have neither.
Your personal mileage on the effectiveness of each sketch will of course vary. In places the metaphors are deafeningly blunt -- failed writer breaking keys off a keyboard and hurling them across the stage; weeping mother picking pink child's party dress out of scattered, rumpled, post-explosion piles of clothing; man talking on phone to his adult daughter as she slowly walks ahead of him and he is unable to catch up -- but for every sketch that doesn't land, there are probably two that do. Rawad's 'pitch' of terrorist attacks as films (complete with his obstinate belief that the bomber is "Our Hero") to a group of blazered executives is particularly chilling, as are a pair of physically mesmerizing scenes from Copp and Patel as they perform a couple deft meditations on a husband-wife-death triangle. (I'm vague, as these scenes are so good as to be worth not spoiling.)
There's a lot of technology and projection at play here; in one scene that never quite works, Rawad is interviewed via a live video feed that hurls his two-story face to the wall behind. The high-tech additions seem unnecessary, though, when the cast is this able to perform without wires; percussion and instrumentation are often found through choral singing and drumbeats off of props, quick costume changes are performed in plain sight, and the show's single most affecting moment is almost completely still: tiny Nada Humsi, as Mustapha's Syrian mother, delivering a gibberish-like, nigh-incomprehensible monologue to her son that begins deeply amusing and transitions quietly into something dark and harrowing.
Not everything clicks. But the vast majority does. And The Last 15 Seconds deserves credit -- and an audience -- for turning a powerful spotlight on an affair that seems composed entirely of shadows and figments.
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"Picture this: I'm standing on a stage," suicide bomber Rawad Abed addresses the audience at one point. "Curtain and lights and you're sitting there, and you're sitting right there. Now picture everything as it is right now. Except... me... everywhere."
A series of imagined meditations between this suicide bomber and his victim(s), The Last 15 Seconds does indeed have Rawad everywhere; he and his defining act have been blasted into every corner of the story, and overlay each successive scene with a pall of inevitability, that everything will end as it began; in fire, noise, and pain. In between, there are found instants of joy and levity equally counterpointed by tragic sledgehammers to the midsection.
None of the scenes are fifteen seconds long, which makes the title feel like a misnomer. And indeed, taking a cue from that idea and compacting some of the lengthier moments down to quarter-minute chunks of emotional resonance might have helped the inconsistent play flow a little smoother. I think the talented cast of creators would be up for that challenge, too. But as it stands, the play is still an emotional permeation of the hidden depths and human shadings to tragedy and loss.
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The Last 15 Seconds is a series of ever-increasingly-large concentric rings being set down one after another: every new component interlocks flawlessly with what's already there, and the story feels whole and unbroken at every point. Yet at the end, you realize
you've been staring at the same shape the entire time, and there's still a dark hole in the center that can never be filled, perhaps purposefully so.
TOO LONG? Try the Twitter-size review!
The Last 15 Seconds raises dozens of powerful answers while at the same time acknowledging that no one knows quite which questions to ask.
David is an Edmonton playwright/actor/juggler and by day he blogs at the Edmonton Journal about Internet culture and is their Social Media Specialist. Follow him on Twitter: @CanadianDijon
