Play a Day: Death and Cockroaches

Eric Reyes Loo

For Monday morning I read Death and Cockroaches by Eric Reyes Loo, available for download from New Play Exchange.

Eric tells a semi-fictionalized version of the death of his father with humor, honesty, and a surprising number of dicks.

I have a homoerotic dream last night and wake up to read a play that includes a wall of dicks. That part was odd, but not unsatisfying.

People keep telling me how lucky I was my father suddenly dropped dead one morning. It's not actually the kind of thing I like to hear, because I am still in the I'd rather he were not dead at all yet stage.

However, these sentiments are offered up from those whose own fathers lingered in dementia, Alzheimer's, or in the case of Loo's father, a poor heart that took its time to stop.

In the immediate aftermath of my own father's death, my mother second guessed her own decisions in the minutes, the days, the months before he died. Part of my job was in telling her there was no right decision, what has happened, happened.

I felt a great deal of sympathy for the Eric in this play, it's his story and he presents himself as a deeply flawed person. But he's the one who is there, in the same city as his parents, who are presented here as having very challenging personalities, and he has to cope with them, and the hospital, the health care providers, the hospice staff, his brother - the responsible one who lives in another city.

I can sympathize. I can also breathe a shameful sigh of relief that I didn't have to deal with any of that.