W. David Hancock’s “Race of the Ark Tattoo” caused a small sensation downtown about a dozen years ago, partly because of its intriguing conceit. Inside a flea market a man spun stories about his foster father, who had died, by randomly picking up the man’s belongings and musing on them. It was a little bit of a gimmick but it worked.  Our Lot with Paul Niebanck and Mariann Mayberry, whose characters go through their dead stepfather's belongings, playing at Here.  This time around Mr. Hancock is not so lucky. His new play, “Our Lot,” which is part of Clubbed Thumb’s Summerworks 2011 festival at Here, shares a similar organizing frame about a dead father figure. Once again a life is told through objects. The objects that Karl, the deceased eccentric, collected in plastic containers belonged to famous people, he would say, including Michael Jackson, John Wayne and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The play, which Mr. Hancock wrote with Kristin Newbom, follows Karl’s stepchildren, who view this claim with a proper mix of amusement and exasperation as they clean out his stuff.  The effect of May Adrales’s staging is a little like watching someone move out of a house: people carry around boxes, empty them, toss items away, pause to argue or trade quips. Unlike “Ark Tattoo,” “Our Lot” does not have stories that build so much as they assemble together uneasily. The script has a one-thing-after-another structure. Most of the characters do not distinguish themselves and instead become mouthpieces for quick tangents packed full of trivia or references that have appearances of profundity.  When Kathy (Joanna P. Adler) refuses to reminisce, Alice (Mariann Mayberry) compares her to “the guy in the Bible who wouldn’t look back,” which begins a discussion about Lot that segues to a question about the sex of God. I suppose this fits into the theme of the dangers of analyzing the past, but mostly this oddly humorless dialogue comes off haphazardly. Someone picks up a box labeled Charles Darwin, and that inspires chatter about how he died. The John Lennon box leads to an impression of Howard Cosell announcing that Lennon is dead.  At the end there is some melodrama and a hint of violence, but these are merely the coda to what has turned into a series of long, droning, random notes.
âOur Lot,â by W. David Hancock and Kristin Newbom, centers on the stepchildren of a man who collected objects he said belonged to famous people.