Funeral parlor sets scene for CSN’s ‘Three Viewings’

Recite and repeat:

"I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you ..."

Life's most life-affirming words open a play set amid death.

"I love you. Nine times! She almost saw me! Whew. That was a close one."

We're inside rehearsals for "Three Viewings," debuting tonight at the College of Southern Nevada's BackStage Theatre.

Tender phrase rolling out and repeating in rapid succession, actor Will Klundt, playing a smitten undertaker as apprehensive as a shy schoolboy, opens his heart to the imaginary back of a woman's head. This is monologue one -- "Tell-Tale" -- in which Emil, the mortician, secretly loves a local Realtor who frequents his funeral parlor, trolling for business.

"At this point, you know this character as well as you know a relative," Sean Critchfield tells Klundt encouragingly, director and actor immersed in an intense dance of creativity.

"Real heart-stopper," says Klundt-as-Emil, speaking playwright Jeffrey Hatcher's words to create a man so in love it hurts, and so afraid to express it, it's excruciating. "The beat coming out of my shirt, like a bomb about to explode. Bump-BUM! Bump-BUM! Bump-BUM! This is all getting much more difficult."

Through three monologues, Hatcher serio-comically explores how we relate to death, and to the dead -- and to each other. "Each character is speaking to the audience and they're telling you the story of the person they lost, it's really touching and sentimental," Critchfield says before rehearsal begins. And this relates to the hesitant undertaker's heartache ... how?

"Spoiler alert!" Critchfield says, and that's your clue to decide whether to skip to the next paragraph. "Ultimately, you find out that the woman he's in love with dies in a car accident halfway through the piece, and he's confronted with his inability to speak up. He kept saying, 'I'll do it on this day and if this happens, then it will work out and I'll tell her.' Those things never happened and now he's regretting the missed opportunity to walk up to her and say, 'I love you.' "

Two monologues rounding out "Three Viewings" include "The Thief of Tears," in which a woman (Cynthia Vodovoz) who makes a living stealing jewelry from corpses comes to take her inheritance -- a diamond ring -- from her grandmother's casket. Finally, in "Thirteen Things About Ed Carpolotti," Barbara King is cast as Virginia, a widow left in debt by her dead wheeler-dealer husband.

"(Hatcher) is exploring different parts of the human condition," Critchfield says. "One is about a woman coming to terms with death, another is about a woman who is dealing with animosity toward her husband who has passed that she never felt before, and there's the man who never told a woman he loved her. You find something to connect to in each one."

Penned in 1996, "Three Viewings" has played to mixed critical reaction. Reviewer Colin Thomas called it "a superficial, predictable text" that "presents the idea of the half-lived life, but none of the substance." However, critic Juliet Wittman deemed it "mordantly witty, entertaining without being shallow" and The New York Times' Alvin Klein wrote that "Three" was "a life-enhancing dramatic and comic play" with an "exceedingly successful notion to play upon three unrelated deaths as the means of unmasking three separate lives."

Doing so, Klundt notes, avoids a play that, thematically, could turn out both heavy-handed and heavy-hearted. "We can't play into, 'Oh, it's death therefore we're hitting the bell that's tolling for everyone' the whole time, these characters have to be enjoyable to be around," he says before rehearsal.

"My monologue is about that seize-the-day kind of thing, really celebrating this moment that we have right now, loving those people around us. If you feel something, you have to do something about it. Otherwise, you get trapped in your own body."

Consulting closely with his director on a simple funeral parlor set -- white love seat and area rug, small angel-face fountain, the soothing accoutrements for bereaved customers in the business of death -- Klundt listens as Critchfield suggests he "play against" his instincts, explaining that as people grow emotional, they at first tend to resist it, rather than simply become it.

Yes, you can rehearse a play to death.

Or rehearse a play about death till it comes to life.

"One 'I love you' was too subtle, so I advanced to two," says Klundt as the unsure undertaker about the lover he desires that we can't see. " 'I love you, I love you.' She still didn't turn in time. I went to three. 'I love you, I love you, I love you.' Nothing. Now I'm up to nine. And this is the first time she almost saw me say it."

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.