NecKromancy

By Lissa Moira and Richard West

Last year, actress/writer/director Lissa Moira and co-scenarist Richard West presented Sexual Psychobabble, a quartet of skits at the Trocadero. The show moved to Theater for the New City and added a longer one-act play, NecKromancy, for a second half.

The title’s play on spelling refers to its subject: a SoHo gallery opening attended primarily by vampires. One by one, human victims wander in to meet their seemingly deserved ends. A venal critic, a greedy dealer, a boorish gossip hound and other well-heeled vermin are summarily dispatched with a chomp to the jugular as the undead patrons muse comically about them. the vampire-as-hip-aristocrat is a thematic card that’s been played before, but this seems to be the first that puts them into, as they are described in the script, the “artistocracy.”

The script is 95 percent Moira’s with embelishments by West (mostly his clever appearance as a neo-beatnik vampire). To say that Moira is given to puns is an understatement. Her often snappy, sometimes strained wordplay is unceasing throughout the action. All of it is quite entertaining, but its “too clever by half” feel sometimes works against the text when Moira attempts to tackle some weightier matters.

The physical production of the work, though, was first-rate. The wonderfully moody lighting design by George Cameron achieved a wickedly seductive feel, with the gallery becoming a sensuous deathtrap. The uncredited set design had a square elegance, and the artwork by Hiromi Luchi was a brilliantly disturbing mix of the carnal and
the bloodthirsty.

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