Forever and a Day at UNDER St. Marks Theater

Edward A Kliszus, Editor-in-Chief / Music and Arts Critic
November 2, 2025
acarmenta, billylucemurray, Camron.alexander7, duran.a.lucio, frigidnewyork, kami.kopcova, Openingnight.Reviews, seanmorillo_0, vy_gaooo

5/5 - (1 vote)

Tonight was a meditation on love, memory, and the fragile geometry of human connection.

Under the low vaulted ceiling of Under St. Marks Theater, that tiny East Village crucible where Off-Broadway dreams are tested by intimacy, playwright Duran Arturo Lucio unfurled a work as delicate as the wingbeat of a cardinal and as unflinching as grief itself. His play, Forever and a Day, presented by FRIGID New York during its Days of the Dead Festival, is more than a tale of remembrance—it is an ethical inquiry into what remains of love when time and mortality have had their say.

The Setting and the Tone

The evening begins, appropriately, in music. Audiences are greeted by the melancholic pulse of “Nunca Tristes (Me Vale Madre)” by Renee, the yearning of Paloma Morphy’s “Mefaltas Tú,” and Kevin Kaarl’s “San Lucas.” These songs summon a mood of Latin American fatalism tempered by joy—an emotional chiaroscuro preparing us for Lucio’s blend of humor and heartbreak.

Director Billy Luce-Murray uses the confined black-box space to heighten the sense of participation: the audience feels less like spectators and more like fellow mourners in a church basement. What might have been a funeral becomes a “celebration of life,” an act of communal witness for Tom, a young man who has taken his own life. Tom’s four pals who gather—Allen, Christina, Laura, and Zander—are friends, hosts, and ghosts, haunted by their unfinished conversations with the dead.

The Architecture of Memory

Lucio, who first conceived this play a decade ago in Dallas and has re-forged it for a New York audience, constructs the drama like a prism. Each scene refracts Tom’s death through a different emotional wavelength: Allen’s guilt-laden affection, Christina’s shy nostalgia, Laura’s familial fury, Zander’s pragmatic tenderness. The story unfolds in overlapping recollections—what might be called a series of concentric veracities—in which the truth is not revealed so much as earned.

Camron Alexander’s Allen anchors the play with a quiet, watchful grief that echoes the great realists of the British stage. We see him half-asleep, dodging calls from his mother, trying to keep his urban detachment intact until news of Tom’s death cracks the armor. Sean Morillo gives Tom a spectral presence: not a vengeful ghost but a Socratic conscience who returns only to provoke questions. When he appears to Allen in fleeting visions, the audience feels that cherished theatrical miracle—the transformation of private despair into shared illumination.

Thematic Undercurrents

At its core, Forever and a Day examines how modern life both connects and isolates us. Lucio’s characters have escaped a small conservative hometown for the big city, yet find themselves captive to new forms of alienation—corporate cubicles, dating apps, the relentless demand to perform stability. Their memorial for Tom becomes a reckoning with their own vanishing certainties.

Ana Armenta as Laura threads the piece with luminous sincerity. Her bilingual outbursts in Spanish—sometimes prayers, sometimes curses—inject rhythm and cultural texture, reminding us that identity is a language of inheritance. Kamila Kopcová as Christina begins as comic relief—self-absorbed, distracted, delightfully incongruous—but her façade crumbles to reveal a deep, almost mystical empathy. Victor Gao completes the quartet with understated warmth; he listens, which in this play is a radical act.

Lucio’s dramaturgy recalls Chekhov’s humane attention to what is not said. Every joke conceals a tremor of loss. Every silence lengthens like a moral question. And yet, as in G. B. Shaw’s best social comedies, the play refuses despair. Its laughter is the sound of endurance.

Days of the Dead Festival. Courtesy @frigidnewyork on Instagram

Craft and Design

Stage manager Winnie Chiang coordinates a minimalist world: a few folding chairs, dim candlelight, snacks, and raffle tickets—tokens of normalcy that feel absurdly poignant. Lighting transitions blur dream and recollection; sound cues glide from pop melancholy and sentiment to sacred hush. The effect is chamber theatre of rare concentration.

Lucio’s language alternates between lyrical monologue and clipped dialogue, balancing poetry with the matter-of-fact. When Laura recalls her brother Tom comparing life to “a mother bird with two chicks, one vanished,” the image becomes the play’s central metaphor: love as care despite inevitability.

In one of the evening’s most striking moments, Christina speaks of her favorite bird—the cardinal, symbol of persistence and visitation. When a red light sweeps across the stage, we feel Tom’s spirit not as supernatural fancy but as emotional continuity. The dead live on, Lucio implies, in our capacity to keep asking why.

Philosophical Resonances

Where one might dissect moral pretenses with dialectic wit, Lucio probes our evasions of vulnerability. He suggests that mourning is not backward-looking but an ethical act in the present. The celebration of life becomes a manifesto for empathy in a culture numbed by irony.

Arguably, theater should bring the unseen moral forces to vision. Here, those forces are loneliness, cultural displacement, and the fragile hope of love. Lucio gives them body and voice. The play’s denouement—no spoilers—binds its characters through forgiveness, hope, and aptly limited resolution. The audience leaves not with answers but with a renewed appetite for compassion.