What I liked
Lauren and Lennon’s performance of friendship was lovely; the way they normalized and made accessible morbidity provided an important permission we are often deprived: the right to talk about and consider our own deaths and the deaths of loved ones during life. The script approaches death without being didactic, allowing an audience psychological space to incorporate their own narratives.
What I didn't like
It might have been nice to have one post-mortem scene (even if just to show Vera continued to exist, for a time), not to bring additional closure, but instead to reinforce the persistence of people despite their short lives.
My overall impression
Perfectly succinct, Funeral Potatoes gives you just enough to both emotionally invest in the characters of the play and to realize that the experiences depicted can and likely will occur in your life in one form or another; navigates discourses of death that, while providing no ‘answers’, encourage you to begin asking questions we too often avoid.
