Review: AMAZING GRAVES Sets Two Short Plays Inside the Same Cemetery

Have you ever wondered what really goes on in cemeteries when memories are shared with those seen and unseen at grave sites?  Then head on over to see two, funny and life-affirming plays in this year’s Hollywood Fringe Festival, bundled together as Amazing Graves, produced by Amanda Lynne for Neo Ensemble Theatre.

Mother Helga (AnnaLisa Erickson) tells her daughter (Tammy Mora) "I Hate How You Dress."
All production photos courtesy of the Hollywood Fringe Festival website.

I Hate How You Dress, written by Beth Polsky and directed by David Datz, shares what happens when four individuals in a cemetery get to say things they should have said to each other long ago. Their conversations are monitored by two angels who live there and are monitoring the newly minted, recently-dead residents to be sure they are ready to proceed to attain their angel wings.

Patti Lewis as Harriet the Handler and Amanda Lynne as Angel Nutella monitor Mother Helga's (AnnaLisa Erickson) progress on earning her Angel wings. 

Soon a young woman’s past comes back to bite her hard when a graveyard run-in with a mysterious stranger forces her to confront her estranged deceased mother, as well as a line-up of eccentrics who make her seriously question her life choices, sanity, and the afterlife’s customer service policies. Set in front of several headstones, as the story unfolds we learn how these four visitors are inter-related both in life and death. But who will be able to leave the cemetery at the end, and in which direction?

Patti Lewis, Michael Newton, and Amanda Lynne.

The cast includes AnnaLisa Erickson decked out in a bright red pants suit that makes you wonder if she is the Devil rather than Bunny Katz, now a hopeful angel who criticizes her visiting daughter’s choices in life from beyond, Amanda Lynne as Harriet the Handler and Patricia A. Lewis as Nutella, two pink-clad angels judging the behavior of pending wing-earners, Janet Hoskins as a cemetery visitor with some of her famous Grace’s Goodies Turmeric Balls to offer her son while expressing forgiveness for his actions,

AnnaLisa Erickson and Tammy Mora

Tammy Mora as the young woman visiting her newly-deceased mother who can share messages between the mother and son, and Michael Newton as Stevie, the man who can see her mother to relay her messages to the young woman from beyond.

Five old friends meet in Our Cemetery fifty years after appearing together in their high school production of Our Town.

Our Cemetery, written by Grant Gottschall and directed by Genny Wilson, centers around a group of 5 aging former misfit classmates from Bowling Green, Ohio who bonded during their 1976 high school production of Our Town and decided to meet up fifty years later in the same cemetery where they once smoked, drank, and fooled around after rehearsals. See what happens when they talk about what they have learned in the decades since, what they have forgotten, and whether or not they can still dance The Bump without breaking their hips. Some friendships will be renewed, some rivalries revisited, and deep secrets, some of them unsettling, are revealed.

Secrets are revealed among old friends who used to meet in Our Cemetery to smoke, drink, and fool around after Our Town rehearsals during high school.

The cast includes Debra Kay Lee, Beebe Smith, Leon Acord, Rebecca O’Brien and Michael Dempsey who do their best to compliment each other while secretly hoping the secrets they have been keeping will not change the others’ opinions of them. But given the hidden content between them involving a secret pregnancy, and the woulda-shoulda-coulda context, who will decide to leave together or stay behind as alone as ever?

Honest portrayals create characters that feel familiar, reminding us of ourselves or perhaps others from our past. especially those who we wish we had gotten the chance to know better.

Leon Acord, Debra Kay Lee, Beebe Smith

Content warning: Each 30-minute play involves discussion of death, adult language (F-Bombs), pot-smoking (mimed only with no actual smoking of any kind), and several suggestions of sexual behavior taking place in One Cemetery with Two Plots!

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