Forever and a Day
Written by Duran Arturo Lucio; Directed by Billy Luce-Murray
UNDER St. Marks | 94 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10009
November 1, 2025
Under St. Marks Theater, one of those East Village sanctuaries where the ghost of downtown experimentation still lingers, playwright Duran Arturo Lucio has offered a small, devastating meditation on love, memory, and the metaphysics of connection. His play, Forever and a Day—presented by FRIGID New York during its The Days of the Dead Festival—is less an elegy than a philosophical exercise in tenderness, an inquiry into what remains of affection once the body is gone and time has had its say.
The evening begins not in dialogue but in atmosphere. The audience enters through a wash of sound: Renee’s “Nunca Tristes (Me Vale Madre)” and Paloma Morphy’s “Mefaltas Tú,”—songs whose melancholia evoke the particular Latin American dialect of fatalism that holds despair and joy in a single chord. These are not merely preludes but statements of aesthetic intent. Like the folk ballads of Lorca’s Granada or the corridos that undergird Rulfo’s fiction, Pedro Páramo for example, they propose an ontology of grief that is communal, rhythmic, and, above all, unfinished.
Billy Luce-Murray’s direction uses the cramped black-box space to cultivate a sense of proximity so intimate it becomes moral. We are not spectators but participants in a ritual—witnesses to a “celebration of life” that doubles as a reckoning. The deceased, Tom, has taken his own life; his four mourners—Allen, Christina, Laura, and Zander—have gathered to remember, to confess, and, in their halting way, to forgive. The result is a work that oscillates between séance and symposium.
Lucio first conceived Forever and a Day a decade ago in Dallas and has since reshaped it for a New York audience, a shift that is not merely geographic but ontological. The play now occupies that particular urban liminality where nostalgia and performance converge. It is what might be called the architecture of memory: each scene diverges Tom’s death through a different emotional wavelength, producing what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called “narrative identity”—the sense that the self is not a fixed point but a story retold in the voices of others.
The four surviving friends embody distinct responses to absence. Allen (Camron Alexander) the ex-boyfriend that bears the burden of guilt, Christina (Kamila Kopcová) the lonely neighbor and colleague that so valued his friendship now retreats into irony, Laura (Ana Armenta), his sister, seethes with familial anger, and Zander (Victor Gao), his friend and soon-to-be-brother-in-law, practices that quiet, nearly obsolete virtue: listening. Together, they form a broken polyphony, a kind of secular requiem. Alexander’s performance, subdued and watchful, recalls the stoic realism of the early Pinter protagonists—figures who suspect that speech may only deepen the wound. Sean Morillo’s Tom appears intermittently, less as ghost than as conscience: his interventions have the intellectual mischief of Genet’s intruders and the ethical urgency of Kushner’s angels.
At its core, Lucio’s play interrogates the paradox of modern intimacy. These are characters who have escaped their small-town conservatism for the supposed freedom of the metropolis, only to find themselves imprisoned by subtler chains—corporate labor, algorithmic romance, the performative sincerity demanded by therapy culture. Their memorial becomes a mirror of the contemporary condition: a group of individuals rehearsing connection in a world that rewards detachment.
Lucio’s tone is distinctly post-digital. His characters live in the echo chamber of self-documentation, their grief mediated by playlists, text notifications, and half-remembered memes. Yet beneath the irony runs something more ancient—a yearning for continuity that borders on the sacred. When Laura speaks in Spanish, oscillating between curse and prayer, the language itself becomes a reliquary: a way of holding what history has scattered. Her bilingual laments recall not only the polyphonic cadences of Caridad Svich and Quiara Alegría Hudes, but also the moral bilingualism of the diasporic self, forever translating between belonging and exile.
Lucio’s dramaturgy, though modest in scale, engages with the moral philosophy of mourning. His silences are not voids but invitations to thought. One might remember Simone Weil’s insistence that attention is the purest form of love; in Forever and a Day, attention—especially Zander’s quiet receptivity—becomes an act of salvation. Each conversation, interrupted and resumed, accumulates into a fragile ethical text: love not as sentiment, but as a form of sustained listening.
The minimalism of stage pieces, yes for Festival practicality—a few folding chairs, dim candlelight, a scattering of snacks and raffle tickets—evokes the domestic afterlife of tragedy. Here the banal becomes sacramental; the theater’s modesty sharpens our perception until the faint hum of a refrigerator feels as eloquent as a requiem. This is chamber theater, yes, but of an unusually metaphysical kind.
Lucio’s language balances the plainness of conversation with the resonance of poetry. When Laura recalls her brother’s image of life as “a mother bird with two chicks, one vanished,” it recalls the spare naturalism of Carson McCullers or Truman Capote—a Southern image reimagined through the lens of diaspora. Later, Christina invokes her favorite bird, the cardinal, symbol of persistence and visitation; when a red light briefly floods the stage, the gesture is not sentimental but metaphysical. The dead live on, Lucio suggests, not through haunting but through the continuity of inquiry—the insistence on asking why.
In the tradition of Albee, Lucio dissects the evasions by which modern life protects itself from vulnerability. Yet where Albee wielded wit as scalpel, Lucio’s instrument is empathy. He proposes that mourning, far from being retrospective, is a radical act of presence. In his hands, the “celebration of life” is not consolation but critique—a manifesto for tenderness in a culture narcotized by irony.
Theater, at its most essential, exists to make visible the invisible moral forces that shape our days. In Forever and a Day, those forces are acculturation, isolation and the fragile hope of love’s persistence. Lucio gives them body and breath, and the result is a work of quietly astonishing grace. It ends—as the best theater does—not in resolution but in invitation: the audience leaves not knowing what to think, but remembering how to feel. Lucio writes of the ethics of remembrance—the duty to love what time cannot return. His Forever and a Day may now unfold in a basement, but it gestures toward the heavens, reminding us that even in a culture of ceaseless forgetting, empathy remains our last surviving art. A longer run and a full production would be so welcome.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on November 13, 2025 All rights reserved.