Depressive Catherine (Lori Allen Thomas) drives off a bridge. Her boyfriend, Mantello (Jeffrey Wylie, with a scuzzy mustache), knew Catherine was suicidal. But her bitter husband, Jensen (Elliott Williams), is stuck on the two bullet holes in Catherine’s passenger window and her last-minute will that left everything to the caddish Mantello, who claims he never even knew her last name. As Catherine’s ghost opens the play in a monologue referring to the night she died as a “miracle,” we’re a step ahead of these two men’s realization that they never understood the fragile, unhinged dreamer. But sometimes it feels like Amy Tofte’s play doesn’t get her either, as Catherine veers from admitting her death wish was a mistake to blissful Zen talk about the peace she found in renouncing hope. In flashbacks, several moments capture the pain and desperation of failing relationships, though the truth of these scenes is diluted by other moments of extreme symbolism: When Jensen confronts Mantello after dredging the lake for the gun, he pulls a leech off his neck and glowers, “I knew I felt something sucking out my life.” David Watkins Jr. directs the temporal, spectral and emotional shifts with care, but can’t resist encouraging Wylie and Williams to stutter and to stumble into furniture when confronted by their ghost lover.
Fridays, Saturdays, 8:30 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Starts: Feb. 15. Continues through March 9, 2008

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