‘End Days’ Is Now

Stephen Hawking, Jesus and Elvis walk into a room… well, roll, float and saunter into a room actually. It sounds like the set-up to a joke, but it is the dramedy "End Days," produced by Langhorne Players and running through July 30 at Spring Garden Mill in Tyler State Park.

The Stein family deals with post-traumatic stress disorder each in their own way. Arthur, who survived the attack on the World Trade Center, stops eating, showering, caring. Sylvia abandons her family responsibilities for evangelical doomsday-saying. And 16-year-old Rachel adopts a Goth persona to keep others at bay and further masks herself from the world in a marijuana haze.

Instead of living, the characters in Deborah Zoe Laufer’s play are just marking time, especially Sylvia, whom Jesus has told that Armageddon will be Wednesday. Arthur has lost the will to live, Sylvia seeks salvation and Rachel annihilation.

It takes a young neighbor, Nelson Steinberg, to drag the family – kicking and screaming – back to each other. Nelson also hides, but in plain sight in a flashy white Elvis jumpsuit. Nelson has retreated to childhood by wearing a costume similar to one his late mother made him when he was 5 years old, and also by studying for his Bar Mitzvah, a rite usually accomplished by younger boys.

Kevin Durkin, who portrays Nelson, steals the show with over-the-top physical comedy and a nails-on-chalkboard voice. Oblivious to the taunts of bullies as well as active disinterest from Rachel, Nelson inserts himself in the Steins’ lives. He turns Rachel on to his favorite author, Stephen Hawking.

It is 15-year-old Dana Maginity’s Rachel that is the pillar of strength on stage. Playing a disaffected teen a year older than herself, Dana gives a powerful performance. Her naiveté shows only when it should, as when Rachel kisses Nelson, takes his hand, curls up next to her father or caves to her mother’s pressure.

She has no time for her father’s breakdown, stomping around when there’s no food in the house, and no patience for her mother’s new-found religious fervor.

"I always thought optimism and joy were signs of low intellect," says Rachel. Her imaginary friend is Stephen Hawking, played by Jon Zucker with comic aplomb. Hawking, a genius physicist, rejects the concept of an afterlife, which is in perfect alliance with Rachel.

Sylvia, played by Laurie Hardy, has rejected life on Earth for the afterlife that can’t come soon enough for her. Hardy comes on strong at the beginning, but empathy builds for her zealous one-note as it is revealed that she, too, was traumatized by September 11. As she interacts with her imaginary friend, Jesus, (Zucker in a dual role) she constantly emits "Oh, Jesus!" and "Thank you, Jesus!" yet reprimands Rachel for saying the same thing as an epithet.

Sylvia plans for the Rapture just as her husband wakes up, slowly, to life. Nelson forces crumpled and dejected Arthur to get dressed and buy some cereal for Rachel. John Pinto is superb as shell-shocked Arthur who slowly revives thanks to Nelson asking for help with reading the Torah. Arthur finds comfort in the Hebrew scripture, so much so that he cleans up his act and fully stocks the refrigerator just in time for Armageddon.

End of days is near, make a ham on rye, or so Rachel, Arthur and Nelson decide, to the chagrin of Sylvia. She sits in a well-stocked kitchen with sandwich prep all around her, discouraging her daughter from going to school because tomorrow "all our earthly needs will vanish."

Mostly Sylvia is just afraid to be separated from her family. Her neglect of her family’s earthy needs is just a smokescreen of fear, dread that "it’ll be that day all over again."

Sylvia doesn’t trust the world anymore. Arthur tells her, "It’s going to be okay."

And it well may be, but it would be a shame to give too much away. "End Days" may come before you ever see three such disparate icons on the same stage again. Representing the mind, the soul and the body, they give us all reason to live.