What I liked
This show is very clever, and Lear and Loman have much to teach each other. Loman plays the fool at times, but Lear offers a compassion to the lost Loman he seemed to find elusive in life. This piece meditates on legacy and the lessons so hard to learn in this life.
What I didn't like
I suppose I would have liked to see more of an intrusion of the living on purgatory, making it a more disruptive and inescapable fact of crossing over. For Lear’s visions, the stage is assaulted by shadows of his life, but for Loman’s, they often exist to the side of the stage in a forlorn reminder of being left behind.
This isn’t necessarily an improvement, so much as personal taste. Loman – to the best of my recollection – spent so much of his life hiding from his suffocating mediocrity, and no lack of work from Bruno reminds us of this. I suppose I’d like to see Loman have an even harder time of it, faced with no option but to watch in sadness as his gossamer legacy passes from memory.
My overall impression
The echoes of characters from various plays dwell in purgatory, waiting to learn the lessons they had failed to while alive. What luck two men of wildly different stations chance upon each other, only to commiserate over their relationships with their children.
