Meditations on Grief Disconnect Audience at Blue to Blue

Christine Deavel’s Blue to Blue follows Beryl, a grieving daughter (played by Cecelia Frye) who can’t seem to stop getting packages of her recently deceased mother’s things delivered to her door. Beryl is accompanied by a pair of ghostly psychopomps who help her evaluate what to do when it feels like there’s no way forward.

Cora (Ken Kavin) is a brooding scholar of Beryl’s mind who, either blocked by some unknown code of conduct or lack of spiritual access, can’t tell her anything about her mother. He has a friendly spirit friend named Dusty (Atlas Peek), who is Cora’s spontaneous, eclectic counterpart. At times, both of them work together to narrate the play yet both also seem to be fundamentally attached to Beryl’s psyche.

In addition to being seen at home, our protagonist builds coffins with her coworkers Marl (Carrie Schnelker) and Opal (Angel Gao). Opal shines as a youthful beacon of positivity and Marl a soft foil for Beryl’s character—she’s a similar age, she shows up early, and is put together.

Opal (Angel Gao); Marl (Carrie Schnelker); Cora (Ken Kavin); Dusty (Atlas Peek); arm coming out of coffin: Beryl (Cecelia Frye).

Courtesy of Annex Theatre

Suddenly, the play kicks into a higher gear. Mysteries begin to dominate the narrative as Dusty and Cora gradually become visible to Beryl’s coworkers. Beryl starts to open her room full of packages and discovers something that permanently changes her relationship with her mother. Excerpts of Emily Dickinson poems begin appearing out of thin air scrawled on crumpled paper and everyone compulsively reads them aloud. Worse yet, Beryl’s nightmares reveal she is being haunted by a terrifying specter she is sure isn’t her mother. Can she find a way to exist in what the playwright calls the “ancient neighborhood of grief,” or might she lose her job and hide from the world, walled in her haunted house-turned-prison built out of a never-ending torrent of packages?

In Blue to Blue, grief is the only antagonist. As the audience, we were kept in Beryl’s mourning by Cecelia Frye’s great acting chops and embodiment of character. At her job, the audience can feel her working to hide her pain when Opal inadvertently reminds her of her loss or when she’s asked how she’s holding up. Back home, her front door is clearly the final frustrating obstacle preventing her from respite. There, you can feel Beryl let go and take off her mask, speak frankly to Cora, and explore emotions that feel real as she demands answers.

Just past the story’s midpoint, when she finds out her mother wasn’t the great artist she thought she was, you see another side of Beryl as she frantically tries to maintain that alternate reality, lying, grasping at the rapidly evaporating pieces of once-truth that made her mother her mother. “She was a successful artist…she had a studio!” This is the play at its strongest.

One of the most eminent issues with Blue to Blue was the lack of genuine connection between its characters and the audience. The characters lacked backstory, depth, defining traits, and overall characterization. Actors thrive in the study of character. When there is none, they need to rely on invented circumstances. The actors did a good job of filling in the blanks, but the lack of characterization kept them from shining. The play wanted the audience to empathize with Beryl’s grief, but that was next to impossible to do because we knew nothing about her as a person; it was impossible to feel beyond surface-level sympathy for the characters.

The dialogue felt very natural and real, but there was a palpable lack of real contrast or tension. Seeing growth and reflection is the mark of a multifaceted character, and Blue to Blue missed the mark on this. Conflict is the essence of good storytelling, but there was no conflict between characters and there were no real arcs or transformations, which left Beryl’s journey feeling one-dimensional, and in turn left the audience uninvested in the story.

Beryl (Cecelia Frye)

Courtesy of Annex Theatre

If a story chooses to delve into themes such as grief and loss, it should tackle such a multilayered subject with layers, depth, and originality. There was so much room and potential to create a profound story that makes the audience reflect on grief and death in a new light. Blue to Blue consistently kept the audience’s focus on Beryl’s grief, portraying her disassociation, feelings of powerlessness, and ultimate triumph over her own life circumstances.

Yet it merely skimmed the surface of the topic. The recurring packages that were meant to symbolize Beryl’s inability to fully process and let go of her mother’s death had a lot of potential to build her character and show the stages of grief; this ended up falling flat because the relationship between Beryl and her mother was so underdeveloped that it was taxing for the audience to grasp the weight of her loss.

In the second half, the structure became increasingly confusing and took away from the ease of enjoyment. During Beryl’s first and second nightmares, Beryl is not in the scenes whatsoever. Cora is apparently supposed to be a stand-in for Beryl’s experience while dreaming. We see Cora interact with the ghost, and upon waking we see Cora’s reaction to the dream, even though it’s supposed to be Beryl’s dream. The audience only finds this out later.

In another scene, the workers take a lunch break from their first day of building a coffin. They drink water and play cards, but the scene does nothing to flesh out any of the characters other than to say that Opal is the best at playing poker.

The use of Emily Dickinson’s poetry, although profound on its own, felt like an empty attempt at literary gravitas. The quotations didn’t seem to occur at any thematically important moments of the play. Too many times, a character would just read an excerpt verbatim as if possessed. The tactic didn’t add any depth or reveal anything about the characters. It landed more like an extremely underdeveloped idea rather than something powerful or moving, as it was most likely intended to be.

The ghost spirits Cora and Dusty had potential to be a compelling and moving aspect, yet they fell flat too. It was unclear who could see them and when, and it was confusing that none of the characters questioned the fact that there were ghost spirits giving them advice. The most compelling stories involving ghosts have multiple facets to them that mirror something about the living. We kept expecting a scene between Dusty and Cora that elucidated their spiritual relationship to the others, but it never came. If they were on a quest with consequences for failure, they might’ve been forced to talk about strategy. Their characters’ struggle with each other amounted to purely physical dialogue and internal emotional work.

Beryl (Cecelia Frye); Cora (Ken Kavin) in Blue to Blue

Courtesy of Annex Theatre

Why was Beryl’s mother’s ghost trapped? Blue to Blue never established a meaningful connection between its spirits and its themes. Why did her presence only dissipate once the last package was received? The answers, if they existed, were too muddled to resonate. The play’s intended climax didn’t feel revelatory or character-changing because to the audience, Beryl’s mother is never known or even named, yet her absence is the singular focus of the play.

Atlas Peek told us that their character, Dusty, is a psychopomp apprentice to her supernatural friend Cora. With the help of their directors (Alison Kozar and Rowan Gallagher), Peek went through many different variations of relationships and motivations with their acting counterpart Ken Kavin. We think they landed in a great place and did an excellent job with their stated goal of “mov[ing] and encouraging Beryl through [her] time of grief and transition in her life,” providing a welcome balance of humor that in more ways than one reminded us that life moves on.

Perhaps the performance is better understood as a free-forming meditation on grief itself rather than a traditional play with an identifiable structure. After all, not every production needs to have perfectly flawed characters with dense immemorable backstories and triumph over insurmountable odds. To be clear, we need more stories like Blue to Blue that tackle the ordinary everyday lives of people struggling to survive in a world of indifference. That Beryl works in a coffin-building shop could be a metaphor for life: people work hard, but ultimately their work is always part of the undeniable path we all share—a path that leads them toward death.

A hidden message of the play—if one listens closely enough—tells us to enjoy the time we have and move forward with those we have left. Over the course of the story’s three days, only one coffin is built by the three experienced workers. Normally, three people of their caliber could create a coffin in one hard day’s work. But something otherworldly is taking place. The coffin’s construction represents the fact that it takes a village to mourn a loss, and a lot of time to do it as thoroughly and respectfully as possible.

Phantasms and poetic wisdom abound, yet it is the human element in Blue to Blue that the audience isn’t quite keyed in on. Unless one has experienced grief firsthand, they are left unable to relate to Beryl’s struggle. Poetically, the lack of interpersonal conflict in the play is precisely what a grieving person needs most in their life in their darkest hour. But no one can mourn their dead and leave their worldly human challenges behind. For the sake of creating a play to shine a lens on the unanswerable question of the meaning of our shared mortality, we would’ve liked to have seen the real-life consequential things that Beryl has to do in her everyday life where grief gets in the way.

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If you are intrigued by the production, the remainder of Blue to Blue’s run can be seen at the Annex Theatre in April.