A woman named Veronica, who is a recent suicide, has to go back to the world of the living to cleanse her “brown tweedy aura” and learn the values of life.
She is persistently pessimistic and cranky and the other spirits dub her "Miss Witherspoon" — the kind of name you'd associate with a grumpy old English lady in an Agatha Christie novel.
This meandering sweep dilutes impact ....aside from a gorgeously realized opening scene that establishes its heroine's particularly obdurate form of depression....the play feels, well, earthbound in its familiar sendups of the nastiness of earthly life.... Ms. Nielsen's eyes go wide at such moments and her voice becomes a wounded bleat.
That the same genuine pain underlines Mr. Durang's habitual archness is what makes him, even when he's not in top form, such an essential and affecting presence in the American theater.
It's a fable that puts a hopeful spin on the modern world's man-made and natural horrors, stand-up comedy that's roll-over with laughter funny—and even at its most whacky and farcical, it's never witless.