'Last Rites': an unsentimental journey

A black lesbian, bald and grumpy from cancer treatment, sits on her couch and contemplates her approaching demise. Sound like fun? Letta Neely's "Last Rites," presented by Theater Offensive, is the farthest thing imaginable from a feel-good drama -- no one is redeemed and nothing is resolved -- but its bruising, unsparing humor, its lack of condescension or sentimentality, will leave you feeling good.

Six years after a double mastectomy, Patrice (Renita Martin) is sick again, and this time it's the end. Her childhood friend Dutch (Naeemah A. White-Peppers), who like Patrice identifies herself as butch, is tending to her, and the play opens with some classic sickroom bickering as Patrice, who has refused a morphine drip, whines for a beer from the fridge: "Bring me a Heineken, Dutch! I just wanna look at it!"

The pausing, muttering pace set by director Brian Freeman expertly captures the tedium of infirmity, with its little chores, its demeaning clutter, the Depends that need changing and cans of Ensure that need drinking.

Patrice and Dutch, a postal worker and construction worker, respectively, have a scuffling, brotherly relationship -- they call each other "dog" and "man," trade insults, and reminisce. As a patient, Patrice is a handful, an irascible presence in a robe and skullcap, her brow knotted in a permanent frown at her situation. ("Burn some incense!" she demands. "Something spiritual!") Dutch, on the other hand, is the best sort of nurse, skeptical but calmly concentrated, cautioning Patrice that a meal of pancakes and ketchup will sicken her, but making it for her anyway.

Patrice has rejected heavy medication so she can face death with lucidity, but as she falls to considering the life she has lived, her contemplation takes on the character of a reverie. She has not made peace, either with her past -- in the form of her fiercely Christian and condemning mother -- or with her present, in the form of her girlfriend Asha, with whom she shared years of addiction and whom she no longer trusts. She is no wan, glowing cancer-saint, in other words, though she does have the desperate mental energy of the terminally ill, and her vision is clear and caustically comic.

The two lead actors have a firm grip on their characters, and their deeply focused interplay is a pleasure to watch. A scene in which Patrice ceremonially returns to Dutch everything she has pilfered from her over the years -- from knickknacks to tax returns -- produces a great line: "Here go your formaldehyde frog, dog!" Body image, butchness, addiction, mortality -- "Last Rites" is what you might call an issue-based play, but only very fleetingly does it lapse into jargon. Just for a second, when Patrice talks about being "invested" in her breasts, we get the whiff of group therapy, but the full-bloodedness of the characters carries us through the moment.

In the second half of the play, Patrice's mother (Michele Dowd) and Asha (Abria Smith) appear, and the conflicts intensify. Asha, who helped Patrice "clean up," has made a deliberate decision to become an addict again (only when high can she handle the situation), and the playwright's message-free treatment of this is exemplary. Buoyed by a line of cocaine, Asha mistily remembers their addicted days: "We were so happy, we treated them cockroaches like pets!" Patrice scowls. Nothing more needs to be said.