At Home Between Deaths

Dinner at Home Between Deaths is a black comedy about the illicit dealings of a Wall Street mortgage trader, Sean Lynch (Todd Waring), who gets outed by one of his own employees—a young Chinese-American sexpot with whom he is also having an affair.

Written by Andrea Lepcio, who once worked for Salomon Brothers, the play, now in a world-premiere run at the Odyssey, is knowledgeable about Lynch’s scam but on shaky ground when it deals with his personal life (society wife, sister-in law who runs a charity, and an uncooperative mistress). On top of that, Lynch is portrayed as practicing Catholic whose guilty conscience turns him at times into a blithering idiot. Lepcio would also have us believe that he’s a decent person at heart, so decent that he eventually makes good on the millions he has duped out of his clients.

That kind of a cop-out takes much of the bite out of the play, turns it into a sitcom whose humor is eccentric and contrived rather than savage and true. Lepcio further hurts her cause by setting her comedy of manners in four different locations and utilizing lots of flashbacks and simultaneous action. It doesn’t work well in the Odyssey’s smallest of three theaters and makes for confusion and disengagement.

The actors work hard to overcome these obstacles: Waring manages to make Lynch semi-believable; ditto Diane Cary as his free-spending, wise-cracking wife, Fiona. Andrea Evans, as the sister-in-law Kat, isn’t given much to explore in an underwritten part, but Amielynn Abellera shines as the sexpot Lily.