Love Among the Graves

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• Ian Walker

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Ian Walker, who's considered one of the Bay Area's most promising emerging playwrights, starts his play, The Gravedigger's Tango, with what would appear to augur a darkly comedic plot all the way through. A man named Trick, a cow-tipping, trailer-trash sort, is set to exhume a bunch of graves but comes face to face with the sinister, club-wielding cemetery caretaker, Laszlo, in the process. A midnight confrontation between a redneck and a creepy custodian seems like enough material on its own for a lighthearted farce, but Walker isn't about meeting superficial audience expectations. The play offers an intricate triptych of three stories -- that of Laszlo and Trick (who's actually Trick's girlfriend in disguise); of the real Trick and his girlfriend Claire; and of the dead Isabella, whose star-crossed tale of love with a doctor begins in a windswept region of the English moors. The tropes seem unmistakably Shakespearean, what with the intertwining tales, graveyard revelations, and gender-bending, but Walker's keen sensitivity to relationships and the powerful manner in which he excavates issues like mortality and euthanasia ground the play in the realm of the distinctly modern.