The digital magazine of New York indie theater
Loading

Not Dead Yet

nytheatre.com review by Yuval Boim
August 15, 2005

It is a welcome relief to sit in the audience of Collective: Cabaret and watch Aaron Samson perform his one-man show Not Dead Yet. He takes good care of us. Writer-performer Samson invites us to listen to a story he weaves as he sets out to unravel the mystery behind his grandfather’s memoirs.At the age of 27, Leo Samson, a Russian Jew with a political affiliation to Trotsky, escapes an execution and embarks on a journey to become American. At the same age and a century later, his grandson and our narrator Jacob Samson, on the run from a fragmented American identity, makes a journey back to Russia. The simultaneous movement between the Old World and the New give Not Dead Yet its shape, which Samson inhabits with deft agility, juggling different spaces, times, and characters. En route to these destinations, we meet a slew of people who form the craggy landscape from which grandfather and grandson make powerful discoveries about hope, survival, and self.Juxtaposing contemporary American and Russian cultures through the focusing agent of a single bloodline, the piece serves as a refractor, highlighting an inquiry into what it means to be American in today’s world, i.e., the world outside the American universe. Samson proposes questions about roots; about what it means to belong. As Americans, we have a complicated relationship to our past which often leaves some of us feeling as if we do not possess an easily referenced culture. Samson captures some of this anxiety as he gets lost in the search for meaning and heritage.While Samson paints vivid portraits of the characters accompanying his present day journey and experiences—a biker chick who calls herself Lil’ Bitch; the Russian host of Jeopardy; his Russian host Olga’s belligerently drunk husband (whom Samson joyfully plays, to our delight, by invoking the common kernel of the dommedia dell'arte and Chekhov’s comedies)—the spaces and characters of the more distant past lack the same vibrancy of texture and color as the present-day. While I understood Jacob Samson’s plight, at times with moving subtly, I didn’t feel like I really got to know Leo Samson. Employing the same prowess of invention to the construction of his grandfather’s story as he uses to introduces us to Olga’s husband would have perhaps given the memoirs a life of their own on the stage. Nevertheless, Paul Nicolai Stein’s clean direction and the specifics of Sean Phillips’s sound design serve as vigorous buttresses to Samson’s writing as together they share with us this intimate and poignant homage to ancestry.