How we face death determines to some degree how we face life. This is very true for the lead character in Jacob Marx Rice’s latest play as characters navigate their own feelings and life choices between the periodic episodes of grief. Directed by Alex Howarth, A Brief List of Everyone Who Died follows Graciela (Vivia Font) from the age of five to her 80s. The ‘trauma’ of finding out her pet dog had died sets her down the road of having difficulty with processing grief head on. Incidently, Graciela’s first experience mirrors Bernard Shaw’s Back To Methuselah, where mankind is introduced to concept of mortality through the death of an anmal.

As Graciela, Font channels a ‘fearless’, passionate nature, as well as her ‘soft centre’ that is susceptible to heartache. The daughter of Puerto Rican Raul (Alejandro De Mesa) and Anne (Kathryn Akin) of Irish descent, Graciela could have grown up in a religious household, with both parents coming from Catholic backgrounds. However, it appears Graciela’s imagination is largely free from dogma and speculates about heaven being a place where the ‘bad’ people go, while the good people don’t die and get to stay on Earth.

Graciela gets to compare different ideas about the afterlife (or lack of…) with Jordan (Siphiwo Mahlentle), a boy she continues to stay in contact with well into adulthood and who has the most profound effect on her worldview, outside her future life partner Cass (Amelia Campbell). Completely different in temperament to her Graciela, Cass makes up for the qualities that she doesn’t possess and able to see matters of the heart with clarity.

Throughout the play, death appears at various junctures in the family’s life, but most of the time the circumstances are ‘natural’, if heartbreaking. Through Graciela, we see how ‘unexpected’ experiences of death – especially in younger people – are the hardest to accept or ‘walk off’… Also, through her we see how many people find it hard to reconcile their feelings with the existence of a benevolent God when death takes everyone indiscriminately.

It is in the play’s moments of death, however, that we see the transient beauty of a life well-lived. Showing the images of the lives one has touched, no life is ever wasted, no person can be replaced… © Michael Davis 2023 A Brief List of Everyone Who Died runs at the Finborough Theatre until 10th June.