Written by Lochlan MacLean and February Schneck
Directed by February Schneck
August 29, 2026
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| Sylvia Grosvold. Photo courtesy of LibLab Productions. |
Memento mori has a voluminous history of appearance in different forms of art: after all, what is more universally relatable than the inevitability of death? In terms of drama, one might think of the eponymous protagonist of the late medieval
Everyman being made to leave behind even family on his unlooked-for pilgrimage into death, of Hamlet conversing with the gravedigger, or, several hundred years later, of Professor Vivian Bearing in Margaret Edson's
Wit using the poetry of John Donne to process her experience of dying from cancer. A one-act contemplation of death and loss that artfully fuses melancholy, warmth, and humor,
I AM GOING TO DIE (And All They Gave Me Were These Lousy Cupcakes) fits right into this storied tradition–and adds frosted treats.
Lousy Cupcake, for short, invites us to the deathday party of the unnamed Figure (
Sylvia Grosvold), who not only must reckon with their own death but has also, we learn later, previously lost someone very important to them. This highly interactive play was conceived by young theater artist Lochlan MacLean shortly after a terminal cancer diagnosis, and MacLean's close friend and collaborator February Schneck, who directs this production, took up and continued the development of the show after MacLean's passing, making
Lousy Cupcake simultaneously a tribute to its creator and a way for audiences to meditate on their own mortality communally.
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| Sylvia Grosvold (left) and audience member. Photo courtesy of LibLab Productions. |
Prior to entering the performance space, audience members are given party hats to wear for the deathday celebration, setting the tone even before the show begins. When it does begin, the Figure enters, in white shorts and white top, and arranges balloons and other party supplies on a white tablecloth, all contrastingly juxtaposed with the final item, a bottle of pills. The presence of this bottle echoes the way in which sorrow is never far from the surface of the show's humor, how awkwardness or discomfort may erupt at any point among more festive feelings (a dynamic, of course, that also echoes life itself). One of the questions that the Figure raises early on is why one would put their own death on stage as a spectacle–a question that points to
memento mori. Another question that arises is much simpler: what is the Figure's name? Dying, it seems, is not good for the memory, and the Figure turns to the audience at various points for help in filling in the many holes in what they remember of their life, and what comes out of those interactions is folded into the narrative. At the performance that we attended, for instance, it was arrived at that the Figure had been a doll and dog dress designer, which we have to mention because while it was a funny answer, a neighbor in our building actually does one of those for a living, and maybe not the one you would guess. While there are bigger questions, the Figure does not neglect "the little things," like one's favorite movie growing up, arguing that the little things are in fact what make a person "real," those small accretions that eventually shape and define our sense of self. They add that we organize ourselves by our interests, which is perhaps truer now than ever before. And through the interactive elements, the play enacts the very sort of identity creation that the Figure talks about as the audience collaborates on supplying what the character has forgotten about themself.
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| Sylvia Grosvold. Photo courtesy of LibLab Productions. |
This process is also akin to how the dead are preserved, (re)created as it were, in the memories of the living. Interestingly, the Figure remembers more about the person they lost–named, significantly, Angel–than about themself. Perhaps, in the end, it is harder to let go of someone we love than it is to let go of ourselves. The Figure also astutely observes that is weird how much of own lives we forget, and this forgetfulness is both a bad thing and a good thing, even something that makes life livable: aside from the overload if we actually remembered
everything, for example, as much as we don't want a lost loved one to fade from memory, we probably do want our grief over that loss to fade. In keeping with the importance of others, the play integrates the whole audience into the narrative by the end in a way that is both clever and moving.
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| Audience member and Sylvia Grosvold (right). Photo courtesy of LibLab Productions. |
It is by no means easy to deal with what Thomas Ligotti has aptly described as the "horror of being insufferably aware we are alive and will die" (
The Conspiracy against the Human Race, 2018, pg. 219)–doubtless one reason that it is such a perennial theme in art–and we can see and feel the Figure groping through the attempt to do in Grosvold's subtly shaded performance. She may elicit a room full of laughter at one moment and allow a deep sadness to break through in the next; she conveys the Figure's anger at attempts to console them for their loss at one juncture and at another wrings tension and emotion from an extended silence. And, importantly, she makes interactive and improvisatory elements seem effortless, weaving audience contributions into the story in a way that makes them feel connected and connective.
Lousy Cupcake raises several possibilities about what comes after death–an afterlife, maybe populated by pieces from our lives; maybe reincarnation; maybe nothing–but whatever the answer may or may not be, the important issue for the Figure is whether we can control how we die–not the means but our framing–again, a theme with a long history. By the end, we know that the Figure loved a quality cupcake, and maybe we can see the middling ones provided for their deathday party as a metaphor for existence, with its unavoidable end: not every cupcake is going to be gourmet, but we can still enjoy it, especially in the company of others.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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