In Jean-Paul Sartre’s seminal play “No Exit,” a trio of recently deceased sinners discover that “Hell is other people,” when their punishment turns out to be spending eternity trapped in a bare room together. Imagine if Sartre could have experienced the bleak, crushing torment of seemingly endless waiting that is the modern airport. I’ve got your hell right here, buddy: It’s gate B27.
That’s perhaps a useful framework for approaching Brielle Jobe’s play “Where We Die.”
Given the title, it’s not really a spoiler to say that we’re going to be dealing with death here. We’re going to witness hapless people being unceremoniously ripped out of their ordinary lives and thrust into a liminal space where none of the old rules apply, a la “No Exit” or Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”
The airport setting is a genius choice; we palpably feel that sense of being in a no-place place, somewhere you just pass through. A loudspeaker admonishes people not to leave luggage unattended as the lights come up on a tableau of six passengers. They’re in familiar states of that peculiarly stressful waiting we all know from travel: a Japanese businessman pounds morning beers, a young Cuban woman obsessively reviews her travel documents, a bored-looking American girl in oversized headphones stares off into space.
At first, they’re each in their own world, each speaking his or her native language—our group is rounded out by an Iraqi man, an Indian woman, and a Polish woman—and they talk to themselves or on the phone to loved ones, but none of them really see each other.
Then comes the explosion. Again, hopefully it’s not giving too much away to say that, yes, this is where they die.
It’s also the moment where they are all suddenly able to understand each other as they attempt to grapple with what has just happened.
Jobe’s wonderfully provocative play, the first iteration of which she wrote as a 20-year-old undergrad, neatly uses this premise to explore the shared humanity of her characters. There are one or two clunky moments as they hash out cultural and religious differences, stop me if you’ve heard this one: a Hindu, a Muslim, and a Jew walk into a bar, but it’s nothing too damning or off-putting.
Where the play really shines is in the individual characters coming to grips with what they’ve left undone, who they’ve left behind, opening up about their secrets, and coming to terms with all the broken places inside each of us that we work so hard to hide in life.
The entire cast is fully invested in their characters, and they leave it all out on the stage in powerful ways. But a couple of standout performances include Ryan Yanghan Hu as Hayato, the bitter, sardonic Japanese failson, and Bruno Costa as Daleel, who, despite his own death, can only think about the family he left behind, plaintively crying out: “I was supposed to be there for them. My parents, they don’t speak much English…”
For Jobe, an American-born, Barcelona-based improviser, musical theater performer, and comedian, “Where We Die” is a real triumph despite a couple of minor quibbles. It’s a thought-provoking, powerful outing that is worthy of multiple viewings and hopefully portends more theatrical productions from her in the future.
