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In Sarah T. Schwab’s “A Stage of Twilight” a couple is faced with the decision to seek medical assistance for their end-of-life process. Schwab explores this intimate topic through the lenses of grace and despair.
With such a poignant storyline, Allen and Sadler’s performances shine through greatly. However, it seems like the story bends the melodrama genre by suddenly adding a young neighbor trying to navigate his family responsibilities and his own struggles with romance. This change seems overly abrupt.
The subject matter never quite allows the story to be lighthearted, but it also doesn’t quite forcefully drag tears out of the audience. In that sense, Schwab certainly did tackle a tough topic, but did not allow Allen to use her full range of talents.
The setting of Cora’s character being a small town librarian from rural New England is played excellently, and Allen’s performance brings Cora’s story to life. Personally, I believe that my favorite scene is when Cora is shelving books and her smile shows the audience that she not only takes pleasure in her work but thrives on it.
Husband Barry (Sadler) appears to treat her with an anniversary dinner. Her murmur of “how old and frumpy” she looks gets a chuckle and a glint. But the wasting cough tells us this scene will not be all about love and care. It’s clear now that love and devotion together will not suffice. He learns his prognosis has altered. There is a new timeline of three months on living.
“Toe-tagging the pipes” of the aged house so a plumber in the future could effortlessly work if need be Barry has different reactions in the range of tad bit furious. Buying a truck of firewood and running through reactions fuels Barry. Barry imagines Cora well taken care of after he has physically left the world. But “I don’t want your last memory of me to be some this old sick man.” He has a different trajectory in mind for that as well.
Leaves tell us more about their lingering courtship and Cora’s feelings as they struggle to cope with this unavoidable doom. That aside, young neighbor children like Jimmy (Marlon Xavier) is questioning the dairy farm being the only source of sustenance on their father’s side. If Jimmy’s stubborn father (Alfredo Narcisco), is interested in reason, there is a possibility of an ag-and-tech college in his future, seeing the kid’s wisdom of improvingamplifying their trade.
He has a girlfriend, Emily Kratter, who already has their entire future planned. Cora, perhaps thinking about her own choices earlier in life, offers suggestions that make her seem like a librarian trying to provide hints, even if the high school guidance counselor is useless.
The narrow focus of the drama shifts to melodrama as Barry announces his dogged intentions for “the end,” and Jimmy, while noting his new girlfriend-to-be, widens the scopes of his college visits. Proving that not much wider means every girl he comes across seems to love his dairy farm inheritance.
Nevertheless, the actors are good. However, the slow and tedious mopey pacing along with somewhat belligerent and more generic “twists” make “A Stage of Twilight” a name which is supposed to imply something much more than the script itself does a rather well-intentioned slog.
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