A Dead Body in Taos is a smart sci-fi that swings and misses
A Dead Body in Taos starts promisingly. A young English woman is called to New Mexico following the sudden death of her mother. Daughter Sam’s initial shock at her mother’s apparent suicide grows exponentially when a tech company claims to have created a digital version of Kath, with her last wishes being to live on as a kind of metaverse avatar.
Sam’s funeral pilgrimage, intended to bury past trauma, becomes a fraught philosophical conundrum, opening old wounds and perhaps offering a chance for redemption. The opening scenes are wonderfully staged, with a ghostly apparition stalking almost imperceptibly slowly behind the action, eventually assuming her space on the “screen” which she claims is her new home after death.
There’s an ethereal, Don DeLillo quality to these opening minutes, setting a lethargic pace for the play to explore its Big Questions. Do we have a soul? Can what makes us human really be copied? Is death a vital part of life?
But this quiet rumination is shattered by a series of flashbacks, which become the meat of the play, presented as memories related by the machine consciousness. It sees a precocious young artist become part of the American student protest movement of the 1960s, fall in love, suffer tragedy and have a child with whom she has a tumultuous relationship.
The scenes are acted against a backdrop of full-stage projections – crowds, paintings, news footage – which add little apart from visual clutter.
It’s well acted throughout, especially Gemma Lawrence as Sam but the wider scope proves too ambitious and I struggled to care about the various figures in Young Kath’s life, who all seem designed purely to push various aspects of the play’s agenda.
To suffer from too much ambition may be preferable to having too little, but I’d have loved to see a more stripped back version of A Dead Body in Taos that really luxuriated in the intellectual foreboding of those early scenes.