CHICAGO—Death and taxes may be certainties, but the truth sure isn’t, in Lucas Hnath’s Death Tax, now playing at Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre.
In a thought-provoking 85 minutes, each of the self-deluded characters goes to decidedly desperate and sometimes absurd lengths to get what they want: from the recovery of a beloved child, to escaping loneliness, to winning a mother’s love, and for the queen bee of the show, to beating death itself.
Rich, elderly, and dying Maxine (the Tony awarding-winning Deanna Dunagan), angry from a recent phone call with Daughter (Louise Lamson), accuses convalescent home nurse Tina (J. Nicole Brooks) of aiding her daughter in planning a murder—hers.
If the old woman dies after the Jan. 1 tax laws go into effect, Daughter stands to lose a sizable portion of her inheritance. So, reasons Maxine, her daughter wants her to die sooner than later, and Tina seems like the most likely candidate to help.
Although this plot is untrue, Tina agrees to accept Maxine’s enormous bribe to keep the old woman alive past the tax law’s enactment. Tina solicits the help of Todd (Raymond Fox), her supervisor who’s smitten with her, and they go to great lengths to keep the old gal around.
It sounds funnier than it plays. This is not Volpone. (Ben Johnson’s Volpone is about an elderly gentleman who pretends to be dying in order to fool the three men who want his inheritance.)
