The Beatles once said "money can't buy me love,” but can it buy you, your life? Maxine Judson, an old woman in a nursing home, certainly hopes so. What do you do when you are wealthy and trying to by more time in life, why pay for it of course. Who do you pay, the nurse that you think is trying to kill you. Then you throw in the complication of an estranged daughter wanting an early inheritance, and you have yourself a show!The audience is filled in the small theatre while the open space is occidental by a hospital bed, a chair, and a stand with a radio playing. Maxine comes and gets comfortable in the bed while the narrator/nurse comes into to announce the scene title and begin the show. There are five scenes in all, one more powerful than the next. As the show develops, along with the characters, the audience begins to have a hard time deciding who is the villain and who is the victim. With a waterslide of twists and turns this show takes you through laughs, cries and even justifications of unspeakable actions.
Death Tax is successful because the characters are so real and relatively normal. They are put in these insane situations where a person thinks they know what the right thing to do would be, but by the end of the show that line becomes very blurry and the little gray area becomes vast.
This show receives a 4/5 bells. It gets notably high marks for its dynamic characters and ever changing definition of the ideas of right and wrong. Some downsides to the show are the incredibly long monologues. Even a profound thought can lose its power if spoken to death. There is also no intermission, so make a bathroom break before the show and get settled for a bumpy ride through one woman's desperate attempt to "preserve" her own life, even if it means costing her the only family she has left.
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