Immortal

The four vignettes in “In a Dark Wood” are connected by their characters’ discovery of immortality, and the demons that come along with it. It may have been easier to break these four stories into separate tales, but the melding of them together creates a new, richer form of storytelling.

The first story, “The Change,” takes place in the middle of Raimy’s transformation from mortal to immortal. There’s something about the stages of this change where she’s neither one thing nor another that is very fascinating. In this section she’s still trying to figure out exactly what is happening to her and what this will mean for her life going forward. While she is dealing with this new reality, she also has to contend with the fact that her parents can’t deal with it (her mother dies from shock on page 12), and that her father won’t accept it. Her dad’s stubbornness in his denial forces Raimy to take matters into her own hands, making her an active protagonist rather than a passive one. Once she has emerged as an immortal, she must deal with the consequences that come along with it: being alone–there is no one who can understand what she is going through–and then falling victim to loneliness. This loneliness

Immortality is a powerful and often terrifying concept. We all have our own ideas of how it could change our lives, but few of us have ever actually considered what we would do if we really were to live forever. That’s exactly the question that some characters are forced to consider in a new play called “The Immortalists,” written by Stephen Karam and directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman.