The Rattlestick is a dinky little theater in the West Village, yet there was Joan Rivers at a recent performance of “The Correspondent,” looking regal — and completely out of place — in a giant fur coat. Knowing she was in the room added perverse icing on the crapola cake we all had to eat.
The situation became especially delicious during a cringe-worthy intercourse scene, the low-water mark of Ken Urban’s schlocky pseudo-supernatural thriller — somewhere in the murk between “Ghost” and “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.”
It’s bad enough to use graphic sex to provoke a rise out of the audience. But in “The Correspondent,” that moment is just one in a series of labored plot developments that make little to no sense.
Maybe now’s the time to mention that the sex in the show is between two men, except deep down it’s not really gay because one is the reincarnated wife of the other. Or so he says.
A wealthy Boston attorney, Philip (Thomas Jay Ryan) has just lost his spouse of 25 years, Charlotte, who was hit by a car after the couple had an argument.
In a harebrained effort to find out whether it was an accident or a suicide, Philip hires Mirabel (Heather Alicia Simms) — who claims she has a fatal disease — to contact Charlotte once she gets to heaven.
It quickly surfaces that Mirabel is a scammer, but too late: The two have fallen in love despite being separated by race, class, age and credibility. Don’t bother picking up your jaw from the floor after Mirabel and Philip’s unlikely romance: It’ll end up right back there when an unnamed young man (Jordan Geiger) turns up and says he’s Charlotte. His evidence: He shares details only she could know.
We’re meant to believe that Philip is so distraught, he’d do anything, believe anything for a chance to communicate with his late wife. But the play makes him sound like a selfish idiot rather than a man in pain. As for Mirabel, she’s not so much a character as a cliché, a tough black woman with the requisite badass attitude. Urban tries to apply defibrillation paddles with a last-minute shocker, but it’s no use: There’s no (after) life left in the show.