Theater review by Adam Feldman
Rating: (★★★★★) five stars
Ticketing: Buy tickets here
It’s mourning in America. Maggie (the superb Quincy Tyler Bernstine), recently widowed, is reeling from her loss in the house she has shared for 25 years with her late husband, Marv, whose sudden death has made him a hero in their suburban Midwestern community. The emptiness of the place is palpable, and made visible, too: Although the living-room decor is described in detail by a narrator (Michael Maher) who haunts the sidelines, the stage we see is empty save for a few bleak chairs, a table and a small kitchenette. As Hal David once lyricized: A chair is not a house, and a house is not a home. And making matters worse is Maggie’s growing, horrified suspicion that Marv may not be worth grieving—that their life together was not what she thought. She’s suspended in a purgatory of doubt.
In style and tone, Bubba Weiler’s elegantly devastating Well, I’ll Let You Go—which has returned for a limited encore run at Studio Seaview after a sold-out run at the Irondale Center last year—owes an open debt to Thornton Wilder’s 1938 masterpiece of Americana, Our Town (and to David Cromer’s 2009 revival of it at the Barrow Street Theatre). But the play also has an echo of ancient Greek tragedy: Weiler structures it as a series of two-person scenes between the stricken Maggie and a stream of visitors bearing news from the outside world, each holding pieces of a puzzle she’s scared to solve. The audience fills in the picture as she does. But while this mystery is the spine that holds the play together, the play’s greatest strength is in the moment-to-moment psychological sympathy and insight that it affords to all of its characters.
As its title suggests, Weiler’s play is about letting go: either of anxieties and fears or of attachment to a loved one. But it also alludes to that particular conversation-ending gambit that pretends to be about the other person’s comfort but is actually about one’s own. Although the people visiting Maggie are ostensibly there to condole her, most of them have agendas of their own, and she—a former schoolteacher—is a reflexive caretaker. The feckless Wally (Will Dagger), who is continually driving his life off the road, relies on her for food. Her best friend Julie (Amelia Workman) and her husband, Jeff (Danny McCarthy), are working through their guilt. A local funeral director, Joanie (Constance Shulman), shows up with balloons to pitch her wares. As they come and go, one at a time, the stage begins to fill up with new clutter.
The play’s very sharp director, Jack Serio, staged it in the round at the Irondale; that’s not possible at the Seaview, but a few rows of audience members are seated on the sides of the stage to help summon that feeling, which evokes the community outside the house while simultaneously—by being just a little too close—highlights the aching intimacy of the writing and the exquisite performances. Via the omniscience of Maher’s narrator, the play provides access to connections that deepen what we see. For example: Behind the morbid comedy of Joanie’s pushy salesmanship, the narrator informs us in a terse aside, is her desire to keep mourning the death of her infant child. And that gives her an unseen, perhaps unknown, connection with Maggie—whose mortgage is far from being paid off because of a construction project that reflects a sad back story for her childless marriage. (The microfiction version might be, “To let: Second bedroom. Never used.”)
Bernstine is an exceptionally good listener onstage (she’s up there with Cherry Jones); you can sense her mind churning as she processes what is being said and what isn’t. That’s part of what keeps the play, despite its potential for overwhelming sadness, at a laudable distance from the maudlin. What Weiler gives us instead is a kind of hard-nosed beauty, especially in the final scenes, which find Maggie interacting with a former student (Emily Davis, rivetingly labile) and the young woman (a limpid Cricket Brown) who was with Marv in his final moments. As for what Maggie learns from these encounters and how the play resolves, well: I’ll let you go find that out for yourself.
Studio Seaview. Barrow Street Theatre (Off Broadway). By Bubba Weiler. Directed by Jack Serio. With Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Matthew Maher, Cricket Brown, Emily Davis, Will Dagger, Danny McCarthy, Constance Shulman, Amelia Workman. Running time: 1hr 45mins. No intermission.
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