It might sound strange, but death has an aftertaste. Something acrid, something that burns, something foul. Annie Lesser’s latest project, Death and Coffee, now playing at 2018’s Hollywood Fringe Festival, is a deeply personal conversation about loss and its aftermath. Lesser, best known for her immersive ABC Project, here shifts focus from her characters to herself, giving one audience member at a time a glimpse into her pain, her struggle, and her understanding of her Grandfather’s death. It is a brave, simple story, unflinchingly real because it is real; Annie invites a guest into her home, into her life, transporting him or her thorough her grief and toward her triumph.
Annie’s prolific work throughout the Los Angeles theatre community is known for its ambition, wild abandon, and expansiveness. By tightening her lens and turning it inward, Annie has managed to execute her most moving production since 2016’s Apartment 8, another one-on-one audience experience that sparked highly-charged emotions. The main difference here is the feeling of being truly present for Death and Coffee; where a participant had the option to silently take in Keight Leighn’s stirring monologue in Apartment 8, Death and Coffee is literally that: a two-person discourse on death over a strong cup of joe (or tea, or cocoa, as it were.)
Due to the nature of the show—and its intimate, conversational setting—audience members that are newer to the immersive theatre genre may find themselves much more at ease with Annie, forgetting that they’re attending a ticketed event thanks to her ability to organically engage her scene partner. This is no accident: Annie tells the true story of her grandfather’s death, and describes her true feelings regarding it. What may seem like a delicate subject at first glance is very matter-of-fact to her. This is how it happened, this is what it felt like then, and this is what it can feel like now. Her openness is both refreshing and wholly necessary to make the work succeed for attendees.
You need not have experienced a loss like hers to connect with Annie Lesser’s story; she’ll bring you along with her from death through grief to, hopefully, what comes after. Hers is not a standard story, though death is the most universal of human conditions. Her honesty and perspective are such that, by the end of her story, you’ll feel as if you’ve processed something along with her; that maybe that taste of death need not linger so strongly on the tongue. Death and Coffee is a fitting name for the show in so many ways; yes, it’s a description of the conversation itself, but it also serves as a sort of metaphor for loss. Death is bitter, not unlike a strong cup of coffee; think of Death and Coffee as what’s needed to make that once bitter story sweet.
Death & Coffee is currently on a sold-out run at the 2018 Hollywood Fringe Festival. For more information, including future extensions, please follow them on Instagram. You can also support Annie and the ABC Project on Patreon for advance ticket sales to future shows and many more rewards.
