BULLET REVIEW“Sorry For Your loss” Michael Cruz Kayne

Minetta Lane Theatre, Greenwich Village

A six week limited engagement that started previewing on April 28.

Michael Cruz Kayne is the writer and performer of this 70 minute one man show premised on the unspeakable loss of his infant twin at 36 days.

Mr. Kayne’s resume as a comedy writer created expectations that he might achieve the impossible task of getting laughs in the telling of this story. I took my seat with an anticipation that felt like I was about to see a guy attempt to walk on a high wire across Niagara Falls.

With a comparable fearlessness Mr. Kayne uses his comedic writing skills, honed as a standup and now award winning staff writer for Stephen Colbert, as a lens for the on stage processing of life shattering grief.

I often find myself lacking the vocabulary and emotional bandwidth to stay engaged with another person’s grief for very long. Mr. Kayne takes us with him on a deep dive beyond shallow offerings like “Sorry For Your Loss”.

He starts with the big picture that we are all going to die. A wall size list of famous names reminds us that each of those people is either dead or will be eventually. He shares a dumb office memo about the stages of grief handed out with the announcement of a co-workers death. Using a blackboard he introduces a theme premised on physics about the number 1 being virtually indistinguishable from .999 and the contrast between a single particle with a wave. The metaphor went over my head.

Mr. Kayne introduces us to his own story, his wife and his two children. With a warning that things are about to get rough he walks us through the excruciating details of a miraculously successful surgery during the pregnancy followed by the horrible loss after his twins were born.

There were parallel themes in this show — the universal reality of mortality, his life story, the wounds that will never heal and the challenge of preserving the memory of the lost child while protecting his two children from the trauma.

There is no comedy in the death of a newborn but laughter can help with tragedy. He did take us through funny moments in his life like skydiving with his wife when his wife was tethered to an instructor who looked like a movie star while he jumped out of a plane tied to Frankenstein.

I have had good laughs at funerals and this show could have used more of it. Wrapping the story of this immeasurable loss in more funny material disconnected from the tragedy would have helped. In a moment that I wish he had found more of we see a projected enlargement of the funeral home receipt with the words “Thank you Come again”.

His stand up material disconnected from the tragedy was weak. On the other hand the young people next to me laughed at material that left me cold but the house never rocked.

Mr. Kayne is personally appealing and his raw grief more than a decade after the loss is palpable. After posting a note to his son on twitter, that he keeps laminated in his wallet, he was flooded with responses from people who have suffered loss. The sampling of those responses was an effective reminder of the universality of grief and the ever present truth that if there was a scale to measure the impact of tragedy the loss of a child would break it.