OTTO
And we carry around your little bags. Always carrying around bags of things you don’t need. Bundles of yarn. Sweaters for kittens we don’t have. An old Bible you know nothing about. Bottles of paint and brushes. Crumpled receipts that are two years old. What do you need all that shit for? I once found a moldy, half-eaten gyro you forgot at the bottom of your purse. You’re a bag lady. Shouldn’t I be disgusted? I think I am. I think I am disgusted. Yes, I think you disgust me.
Still Turning: Love, Ageing and the Ordinary in Mitch Finn’s The Lazy Susan
If you have ever sat across from someone you love and realised comfort can exist alongside distance, you already understand the ache at the heart of Mitch Finn’s The Lazy Susan. Life, like the revolving tray at the centre of this play’s restaurant table, moves in familiar patterns: same arguments, habits, and longings, slowly spinning but never arriving anywhere new. Finn captures this circularity with piercing simplicity, inviting us to see in Lillian and Otto the reflection of our small failures of attention that accumulate over time.
The Lazy Susan is a haunting, elliptical one-act that traces the quiet disintegration of a long marriage and the subtle solitude of ageing. Set entirely at a Chinese restaurant table, it unfolds as a study in emotional inertia. Lillian and Otto, a retired couple in their sixties, sit together yet remain profoundly alone. Their dialogue overlaps without fully connecting, creating a deeply unsettling yet strangely tender portrait of two people who share a life but no longer inhabit the same world.
From the moment the lights rise on the bistro table, Finn signals his minimalist intent. The stage directions emphasise stillness: the couple waits for food that never comes, their conversation circling like the lazy susan itself. Lillian drifts into nostalgia, reminiscing about lost cats, vanished Christmases and family gatherings, while Otto expresses frustration, ranting at absent waiters, unseen doctors and the creeping indignities of age. Together, they form a single, fractured consciousness, as if the reader is eavesdropping on the echoes of a marriage that persists out of habit.
The play’s structure is central to its effect. Finn writes dialogue that refuses to intersect, lines orbiting the same emotional centre without colliding. Lillian’s repeated concern for her ‘poor kitties’ and Otto’s obsessive complaints about doctors and spicy food operate on parallel tracks, each reflecting a shared underlying anxiety. Her missing cats become a metaphor for vanishing tenderness and memory, while his heart condition embodies the fragile machinery of pride and vitality. The lazy susan functions as a quiet symbol of repetition and futility: everything revolves, yet nothing truly advances.
Finn’s writing is rich with irony and subtext. Otto’s defiant claims, “I’m not done, I tell you! I still have life in my bones!” ring hollow against his evident decline, while Lillian’s recollections reveal a denial of the present. Both characters are trapped, rehearsing monologues while pretending to converse. The absence of their children, the vanished cats, and even the waiter Otto calls for, who never appears, amplifies the sense of emptiness, lending a ghostly weight to the everyday routines that dominate their lives. When Otto snaps, “You disgust me,” it lands not as cruelty but as exhaustion, and when Lillian speaks softly of family and Christmas lights, it is survival.
Dark humour prevents the play from becoming entirely bleak. Otto’s fixation on spicy food and Marco Polo’s adventures borders on absurdity, while Lillian’s knitting for missing cats leans towards the surreal. Yet beneath the humour lies tenderness, a portrait of people trying to keep small rituals alive in a world that has stopped responding. Stylistically, the play recalls the disjointed realism of Beckett or Pinter, where conversation becomes a vehicle for existential dread rather than communication. Pauses, repetitions and overlapping thoughts leave the reader to assemble meaning from fragments, like turning a lazy susan to glimpse each dish in turn.
Effy Kousteni, Co-Editor-in-Chief
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