You can't understand it at first. You get glimpses of it-a child's hand lingering on your own, yellowed pages of a love letter, a glimpse into a window on your drive home. Something that tells you about life-about how it's unique, how it's fragile and how it's ultimately out of your hands. Try as you might to contextualize it, try night after night with your fists balled up to push the ghosts, you can't. It's beyond you, but you're thrust right into it, and that's the hard part about the reckoning: At its core, we're all spinning around in our own orbits, sailing towards an inevitable sun we can't comprehend until it's staring us in the face and we burn up from the inside for a reason, for an answer, for hope.

Theater and dance major Annie MacRae '04 decided to examine life and its reckoning in the form of "Torn," an original play she composed as part of her honors thesis. "Torn" takes place at the stately Hamptons homestead of the Taylor family, who have lost their daughter Samantha in a car crash. Told through a tumultuous two-year period, the plot weaves its way through the lives of Samantha's parents, Lucinda and Greg (Honora Talbott '07 and UMASS student Nicholas Dahlman), her sister Chloe (Emma Jaster '07), her boyfriend Billy McMullin (Tyler Mixter '06) and her best friend Liza Goodrich (Scout Durwood '06). The project was advised by Playwright-in-Residence Constance Congdon and directed by Michael Birtwhistle, a retired member of the department. "Michael was invaluable to the process … [He] never lost sight of the loss at the core of this play, the emptiness in the house-in the haunted bedroom and empty dinner table," said MacRae.

Indeed, the events all unfold in a set eerily overlooked by Samantha's bedroom-a memorial to the presence of a loved one long gone who would come to haunt this family for the rest of their days. MacRae's script concerns itself mostly with how each member of that family deals with that haunting-the photos, the yellow sweaters, the jewelry that must be delegated, the memories, the outrage, the aftershock and, most notably, the grief. "This play primarily examines grief and what happens to a family and to individuals when they experience a sudden and devastating loss," MacRae told The Student. "Grief is an interesting thing in that everyone deals with a loss differently."

It is in this aspect that the drive for representation is the strongest. Talbott, for example, absolutely stole the show with her heartwrenching portrayal of Lucinda, who finds herself completely paralyzed-spending most of her days writing to her dead daughter in a journal, grasping at straws to understand. Lucinda's speech is heavily couched in the strong ties between mother and daughter, and she is stricken by the grief she claims (so rightly) only a mother can know. Talbott did incredible justice to the character MacRae had intended, perfectly conveying the tenuous limbo between life before and after, forever marked by an empty pull so strong it could choke you to death.

Dahlman and Mixter, though providing moments of wry levity throughout, also take on heavy responsibilities. Dahlman portrayed a man isolated in his grief-burying himself in work, dealing with things "in his own way" as he gradually alienates himself from his family. Mixter brought a sympathetic character to life; you could feel his loneliness and desperation tangled up in the sheets of a lover's bed he's simply too big for, trying to understand where to go from here.

Durwood takes on the daunting task of portraying Liza (she was driving; she also ends up dating Billy by the end of the play). A pariah by way of circumstance, Liza's character has a certain edge about her that the others do not. The notable differences in Durwood's tone and manner certainly get this point across. The meaning of her character slices through each scene as we're left to question whether or not we hold her responsible and what this means for her own mourning.

A fascinating character also exists in Chloe. Jaster portrays Chloe with a certain air of gritty detachment, though you get a strong sense that she is obviously affected in many ways. She must put aside some of her own grief to deal with the stress of her parent's estrangement from one another (and from her), as well as the strange "social responsibility" to "dance a little more, or take another shot,"-not to mention her concern with bringing Liza back to the family fold, as well as dealing with her asinine and awkward ex-boyfriend (Mike Kohl '06).

The play, though steadily careful to portray each character's relationship with Sam and with the other characters, slowly unfolds to reach its full dramatic potential in high-Taylor form as Dahlman delivers his last "toast" of the play at what has been a rather therapeutic, if macabre, 21st birthday party for Samantha. As each of the characters stood up on stage, silent save for Dahlman, who on closing night seemed to be struggling to get his words past the lump that must have been forming in his throat-they looked past the audience into a future unseen, searching slowly still for the answers that probably would never come. It seemed peaceful, delicate almost-as if all they really needed was a moment to speak to Samantha one last time. As Dahlman called out to her, begging her to hold on-you could really start to see something. You could see a family tied together by the very thing that had torn them apart. You could see love. You could see a history. You could see maybe the faintest glimmer of hope-all wrapped up in the idea that somewhere, for a moment, this family stood up inside a swirling miasma of inquiry and overwhelming loss and it all stood still for a moment. It was quiet. They reached out. And they spoke.