The Wooden Breeks

Lovemaking and undertaking are both major elements in Actor’s
Express’ The Wooden Breeks, but in its simplest terms, the play is
the tale of a quirky town. It unfolds as a hearthside story told by a
cynical tinker (Theo Harness) to a much-abused orphan boy
(Andrew Bracken), who find themselves both audience and
participants in the tale’s telling. The narrative self-consciousness
is just one of The Wooden Breeks’ heady, ambitious touches, not
all of which catches fire.
Playwright Glen Berger places the action in Brood, a benighted
British village populated by Dickensian archetypes. Its citizens
include a mousy vicar (Bill Murphey) desperately in love with a
perpetually mourning widow (Joanna Daniel) who has a comic
fascination with suicide. The town’s bullying gravedigger (Matt
Stanton) moonlights as a grave robber who wears the finery of
the disinterred, while a pair of facile lovers (Jessie Andary and
Nathan Mobley) coos romantic trifles at one another.
Things are bad in Brood in the best of times, but they get worse

when the poverty-stricken town gets caught up in the 19th-
century phobia of premature burial. The fear is stoked as a ploy to

sell special coffins outfitted with bells to be rung by “corpses” who
are not quite dead yet. The townsfolk are shocked to learn that
the coffin saleslady, Miss Spoon (Jennifer Crumbley-Bonder), is a
dead ringer — pun intended — for the orphan’s late mother.
Miss Spoon’s strongest and strangest sales pitch is to the
lighthouse-keeper (Daniel May), a young scholar who never
sleeps or goes outdoors and spends all his time with his books.
But Miss Spoon begins sending him beguiling letters that inject
sex into his scholarship and derail his train of thought.
The title draws on an obsolete slang term for a coffin, and Berger
employs songs, rhymed verse and antiquated turns of phrase
reminiscent of Naomi Wallace or Caryl Churchill. A complex work
of worthy ambition, The Wooden Breeks attempts much with its
poetry and theatricality, but at times the grasp is not equal to the
reach.