Bryony Lavery’s latest play follows the intersecting lives of five people in a big city: Harper is about to die—and is running late for a date. Matt is her boyfriend, counting the minutes she’s overdue. Elle is their waitress and an actress waiting for her career. May explains the ambiguities of life in the quantum universe. Guy is a healer with a past of his own.
As these characters collide, so do the vocabularies they use to analyze and comprehend the vast world around them—the languages of energy healing and quantum entanglement; Matt’s figuring and counter-figuring of time, money, and statistics; the litany of chemicals from Harper’s hand cream and mythologies of the afterlife from her dissertation.
Dirt not only offers multiple languages to frame the events in the play, but questions whether there is an ultimate understanding to be found. The play begins as a murder mystery—who done it?—but its procedural problems unfurl into a more complex examination of the point where mortality and culture meet. Each of these characters grapple with the messy questions left in the wake of Harper’s death. (Harper, for her part, has quite a few of her own.)
And the play lives at the intersection of mess and questions—or at least the intersection of the physical presence of dirt (the set features 5,800 pounds of soil) and the ideas it provokes. Dirt carries both intimate and cosmic implications in Lavery’s play: it’s debris; it’s a shorthand for the human impulses of attraction, revulsion, and contamination; and it also serves as a signpost for the ways that contemporary life pushes aside the brute facts of death and disintegration. Harper’s decaying body and lively commentary from beyond the grave become the laboratory for Lavery’s investigation of the interface between the physical self and internal consciousness—between the body and what may be the soul.
—Adrien-Alice Hansel