Having performed with the writer of Modern Martyr before, I knew it was something I had to see. So, it was on a chilly Friday evening that I found myself sitting in the Black Box Theater, a small room in the Fine Arts Center, surrounded by its three black wall and one white, staring intently at the bed at the front of the room. I really wanted to just climb into it and sleep. But I was here to see a show, as were the other people who had braved the cold to see it. Old and young alike, friends crowding in to find seats, gray-haired couples wrapping their coats around their thin frames, it was a good crowd for an eight pm show on a Friday night.  
The story is about a mother and her daughter, watching over a dying grandmother as the narrators speaks of martyrs and dying and reflects on the briefness of life. As the mother and daughter stand watch, they reflect on their own memories with the woman dying in front of them, and present the perfect picture of mankinds unease with mortality. Within this storyline, though, is a kind of subplot; how the mother and daughter see one another, how they see this woman in front of them and compare her to their life with each other.  
Overall, I liked the performance. Walking into it, I was prepared to be blown away by large words and complicated metaphors, but instead I was greeted with a simple story about a woman who is dying, and the people who loved her. I like nothing more than a simple story. I also loved the narrator, who, as she stands away from the others, tells the stories of martyrs throughout history, instead of just running the inner monologue of the other characters. She provides insight to the historical context in which the mother is trying to frame her mother; a woman who sacrificed everything in her own life to see that her daughters could live a better life. I quite liked the narrator. But I also liked the small and intimate setting in which is was performed. While Im sure there wasnt much of a choice in that, it was cool to be so close to the story. You could almost imagine yourself being one of the nurses who might, occasionally, walk into the room and observe these characters as they struggle with the fact that they are about to lose a loved one. If gives you an almost guilty feeling for intruding on this highly personal moment, but at the same time you cant help but love it.
I think the primary message of the play is to say that, once people die  or as they lie dying in front of us  we turn them into things that they never were. We raise them up in our minds, because turning them into a good person is better than remembering them as a bad one. This is created by the narrators images and the interaction between the mother and the daughter. Throughout the entire performance, the mother waxes poetic on what a wonderful person her mother was, while the daughter merely ignores her. At the end of the play, the mother tries to tell the daughter once more, but finally the daughter stops her, and with three words, stops the mother from recreating her mother: She was cold.
Personally, the performance just made me remember why Im so scared of death. Not just because you are losing someone you love, but when I die, how will I be remembered? I dont want my memory so easily changed; I want to be remembered exactly as I am. But this performance reminded me that keeping someones memory alive is not easy, and that eventually, it will change.
Overall, I liked it. It gave a unique view into the world of a family who is losing someone. It let you see the grief and the pain and even the lightheartedness of sending someone off into whatever awaits them after death. The subject of death is never comfortable, but this made it a little easier. Im glad that my expectations werent met; the over-intellectualized production I was ready to see turned out to be a simple story. Should something like this performance ever turn up on campus again, I will gladly go see it, if not to explore the topic further, but to see other interpretations on the human reaction to grief and death.
