There is, perhaps, a pervasive undercurrent of nostalgia in Oliver’s play, but the acting never errs toward the cloying or the sentimental. In the end, the hybrid actor and author becomes a polyvalent, shape-shifting bard—a chronicler of lost lives who reveals (as the title of the play suggests) as much about himself as he does about his ensemble of weirdoes. For Oliver, life itself is a stage, and he molds these eccentric personages, who passed through life anonymously, into characters worthy of Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky. The infernal existences of these netherworld inhabitants is captured through an intoxicating prism, that of the narrator’s own disarming, poetic sensibility.