Two pros shine light on a murky 'Vigil'

Steven Hendrickson is an actor of manifold gifts who astutely cuts to the quick of his characters with seeming ease. Mentally and physically, he has been a strong presence on Twin Cities stages, ranging from Shakespearean heroes and anti-heroes to comic triumphs, as he did this summer as Sherlock Holmes at Park Square Theatre.

But are his gifts enough to let us see something more than overlong morbid humor in "Vigil," Morris Panych's one-and-a-half note comedy?

The play's recent East Coast productions received mixed reviews, some rightly critiquing the Joe Orton-esque work for its length.

Hendrickson depicts the lead in "Vigil," which is essentially a one-person show. It opened Friday at Pillsbury House Theatre, the same stage where Hendrickson memorably played gnarly lawyer Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" in 2000.

"Vigil" couldn't be more different from Kushner's fantasia.

Directed with early snap by Stephen DiMenna, the two-act play pivots on end-of-life encounters that should make Sarah "death panels" Palin fidget. An asocial, neurotic banker named Kemp has been summoned to the bedside of his elderly aunt Grace (played by the venerable Shirley Venard).

Kemp thinks that she is dying and hopes to inherit her estate, including the chockablock apartment that set designer Joe Stanley has rendered as a pack-rat's heaven. The problem is that she will not go gently into the night. So Kemp decides to give Grace a nudge or two.

Sometimes blithering, occasionally blathering, Hendrickson struggled in the early going of "Vigil" on opening night. But the actor recovered quickly to perform with aplomb. He deftly irrigates the insecure soul of a character who has no friends and, frankly, very little redeeming about him. Which is what makes his performance so compelling. Even as the play drags, and it really should be condensed into a taut one-act, Hendrickson digs at his character like a miner at a potential mother lode. He excavates the layers of bitter refuse blocking his true, glinting core.

At the end of the play, a character who initially was easy to dislike becomes endearing, and "Vigil" is transformed from a bitter comedy into an odd-couple love story.

Hendrickson has an excellent partner in Venard, who acts with silence, mugging earnestly or staying coldly still to communicate clearly.

DiMenna does the best he can to increase tension by using agitating music and comic blackouts (which usually follow dramatic questions). This play has gotten quite a few productions, but it still feels like a draft, even if this Twin Cities team elevates it to something funny and fetching.