Your Wife’s Dead Body has a juicy premise: What if we could live on beyond death but with a new AI-created personality based on a deep study of what we were like when we were alive?
Jenny Ledel’s gripping new play pulls it off not by railing against technology that reduces us to an algorithm or by meditating on the ethics of such an intervention. Instead, it focuses on how the idea might unfold for one woman, a case study in what makes us human and how hard it is to pin down.
For the first 15 minutes of the show, seen on opening night at Second Thought Theatre, Ledel is alone on stage, her terminally ill character Jane deliberately grilled by a neutral AI voice, courtesy of the Lazarus Project. This is the before.
The action then switches to the after as her freaked-out husband, Jackson, begins to deal with his dead but somehow still alive, almost normal-sounding wife in her old body. Does he want to go, she asks, to what AI has mistakenly determined is her favorite restaurant?
For the balance of the play, Dead Body toggles between AI’s unrelenting if largely sincere questioning of original Jane -- a process with which she grows increasingly frustrated -- and the consequences of living with and being replicant Jane. It’s an ingenuous if simple structure, allowing the drama in both chronological arcs to build separately.
Comic moments occasionally relieve the tension. Fooling around with Jackson for the first time, new Jane shuts down. It turns out he didn’t enable all the settings, including the one for sex.
A fixture on the Dallas theater scene, Ledel is so comfortable on stage that it’s impossible to catch her acting even when she’s playing Jane II. Drew Wall as Jackson is her equal, though he has a showier role that requires him to frequently jump out of his skin. His pain and uncertainty are palpable.
The only other performer seen on stage is Francisco Grifaldo, who plays Jackson’s co-worker and friend Dan. In a key scene, there’s awkward tension between Dan and Jane, the sequel. Even if she’s no robot, he can sense what’s not quite right about her. In fact, she can, too.
Ledel has given the character occupying Jane’s formerly dead body self-awareness and not being quite right eventually makes her sad and desperate. It’s chilling, accomplished in just a few scenes.
Three other actors -- Rhonda Boutté, Danielle Pickard and Alex Organ, Ledel’s husband and a former Second Thought artistic director -- furnish the AI voices that are trying to learn all they can about Jane in preparing her replicant personality algorithm. The play spends a lot of its time in the before, reflecting the difficulty of the endeavor.
A member of the Dallas Theater Center’s resident acting company, Organ directs Dead Body in a minimalist style governed by the sharp contours of Ledel’s script. The stark black and white runway set he designed with Wall adds to the clinical atmosphere alongside distinct lighting and sound, respectively by Lori Honeycutt and Cresent R. Hayes.
Ledel, in the first major production of one of her plays, arrives in this new role with a powerful, fully human voice.
Details
Through July 26 at Bryant Hall, 3400 Blackburn St. $30. secondthoughttheatre.com.
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