Eileen Barrett & Meaghan Chenosky. Photo: Tina Krueger Kulic

Dead People’s Things

By Dave Deveau

Phyllis, a Millennial, inherits a house and all of its contents after her estranged hoarder aunt commits suicide. She then must work with neighbour Beatrice, a Baby Boomer who has been named executrix, to try and make some sense of the life and death of a woman she barely knew, through the things she left behind. Based on true events, Dead People’s Things is a heartrending haunting that examines loneliness and the strange contradiction between belongings and belonging.

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"Dead People’s Things, is smart and heartfelt, funny, and devastating... Dead People’s Things tackles life’s biggest, messiest experiences—grief and survival, fear and depression—and then revels in the quiet moments it carves out for itself in the characters’ personal reckonings. The play grapples with all the ways loss ruins us, the way it haunts, rages, exhausts, and inspires us, leaving ash in our mouths from all the questions we never asked, little fires in our bones smouldering out our best intentions."
The Georgia StraightAndrea Warner

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"This smart, funny, touching play has all the makings of a repertory staple."
Vancouver ObserverLincoln Kaye

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"Deveau’s script tiptoes to the edge of melodrama but never steps over. Most of the mysteries he sets up remain satisfyingly unresolved. And in Phyllis he has created a richly complex, deeply human character — the skeptical, detached millennial who becomes fully engaged in her own and another’s life"
Vancouver Sun Jerry Wasserman