“Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.” So goes the famous opening
line of Adam Rapp’s Nocturne, laying out the central fact of
this acclaimed solo play and leading into a characteristically Rappian
flourish: “I can change the order of the words. My sister I killed 15
years ago. I, 15 years ago, killed my sister. Sister my killed I years
ago 15. I can cite various definitions. To deprive of life: The farmer
killed the rabid dog. To put an end to: The umpire killed the tennis
match. To mark for omission: He killed the paragraph… To slay. To
murder. To assassinate. To dispatch. To execute. You can play with
tenses. Will kill. Did kill….” If such writing sends you into poetic
raptures, go see Nocturne right now. If such language makes you
want to smack the dictionary out of the writer’s hand and scream at him
to get on with it, meet me at the exit at intermission.
Nocturne does, eventually, get on with it, as our accidental
manslaughterer flees his frozen family for New York, where he’s brought
back to life by literature and, eventually, love. Nocturne is
performed by Seattle actor Craig Doescher, an accomplished, appealing,
wonderfully idiosyncratic performer who does what he can with the task
at hand. But thanks to Rapp’s relentless thesaurian
pirouettes—the linguistic equivalent of treading water,
prettily—his efforts are too often in vain. Saddled with a script
so dense and flowery it makes Tennessee Williams look like a
minimalist, Doescher is a winning actor in a no-win situation.
