Real Families Really Matter in “The Reservoir” and “You Got Older”

Ever since Sophocles put the fall of the House of Oedipus onstage, the theatrical canon has been chock-a-block with unhappy families. And that makes sense because they make for good drama. But despite the failings they may have, few real families are so totally dysfunctional and so I found it refreshing to see two recent shows centering their stories around the kinds of supportive—even if flawed—families that most of have or are struggling to create.

Josh, the central character in The Reservoir, a new dramedy by the young playwright Jake Brasch that’s now playing at the Atlantic Theater Company's Linda Gross Theater, is a mess. Even though he’s only 20, Josh has been in and out of rehab for years and was recently kicked out of NYU. When the play opens, he’s just coming out of a bender and, as he explains to the audience, he has no memory of how he’s ended up sprawled alongside the titular waterway back in his hometown of Denver. 

His mom is so fed up with Josh that she requires him to take a Breathalyzer test before she’ll let him into the house. So Josh turns to his grandparents for emotional support. But they’re by no means perfect. His sweet cookie-baking grandmother Irene is an evangelical who’s uneasy with the fact that Josh is gay; and her husband Hank is trying to cope with Irene’s descent into dementia by downing beers and watching junk TV. 

On the other side are Josh’s Jewish grandfather Shrimpy, who is working hard to fend off the ravages of aging by acting younger than he is, including preparing for a second bar mitzvah. And finishing up the quartet is Shrimpy’s long divorced wife Bev, a retired career woman who takes pride in being the cool grandparent but who is guarding some secrets of her own. What unites all four is their love for Josh and their desire to help him stay sober.

Now I know much of this sounds grim but Brasch, aided by Shelley Butler’s simple but buoyant staging, interlaces the serious themes of alcoholism and dementia with humor that is alternately heartwarming and laugh-out-loud funny. 

It would have been easy for the grandparents to disappear into old-people clichés as so often happens but here they are played by some of the best older actors in the business, with Mary Beth Peil as Irene, Peter Maloney as Hank, Chip Zien as Shrimpy and most especially Caroline Aaron as Bev, all investing their characters with a precise admixture of fortitude and vulnerability,  Meanwhile, Heidi Armbruster and Matthew Saldívar are just as good in a variety of smaller supporting roles. 

But this is Josh’s play and Noah Galvin channels all of his own affability into portraying a guy who knows that he can get by on his charm but who is also frightened that he may have little more than that to offer. The ending isn’t entirely happy but there’s great satisfaction in watching as both Josh and his grandparents benefit from leaning on and propping up one another.

Mae, the main character in the revival of Clare Barron’s You Got Older, which opened this week at the Cherry Lane Theatre, goes through a similar experience. After her life crumbles—a bad affair results in her losing her married boyfriend, her job at a law firm and her apartment—Mae also finds herself returning home, in this case to Washington State. And she too finds an ailing relative, her widowed father who has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer.

I didn’t see the Obie-winning original production of this play that ran at HERE Arts Center in 2014 and helped to establish Barron as an exciting and distinctive voice in the American theater but the unique mix of You Got Older’s dark humor and genuine open-heartedness make clear what that initial fuss was all about. 

In her 30s, Mae is older than The Reservoir’s Josh and she isn’t as troubled as he is but she’s still struggling to move ahead. And her futile coping mechanisms from making up erotic S&M fantasies—which play out on stage—to hooking up with an oddball former schoolmate she barely remembers aren’t working. 

Instead what sustains her are the laconic conversations she has with her dad (here played by the always terrific Peter Friedman) and the amusingly banal exchanges traded with her three siblings as they all gather around their father’s hospital bed.

Alia Shawkat’s performance as Mae didn't grab me at first (click here to read more about the actor who is making her stage debut in this play) but the more I thought about it and about Anne Kauffman’s overall shrewd direction the more their deadpan approach seemed to accurately and viscerally evoke the numbness that so often creeps in when life beats us up. 

I suspect that what makes The Reservoir and You Got Older work so well is that their playwrights are drawing directly from their own life experiences. In their Playbill bio, Brasch, who is in recovery, dedicates the play to their “Grandma B.” and in earlier interviews, Barron has said she wrote her play while going through a medical crisis with her own dad. Both their plays are bearing testament to the existence of functional families—onstage and off—and the power of that unconditional love.

 

 

The Infectious Qualities of "Bug"

Maybe it’s the current dystopic state of the world but I had a hard time with Bug, the revival of Tracy Letts’ 1996 play that opened this month at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre. It tracks one couple’s descent into the morass of conspiracy theories and the unease of watching that spool out has stayed with me. 

Letts has said he was inspired to write the play after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It was his effort to figure out what might cause people like the once-patriotic soldier Timothy McVeigh to become so insanely alienated that he would blow up a federal office building, killing 167 people, including 19 kids whose parents had left them in what they thought would be the safety of the building's first-floor day care center. 

Letts focused his narrative on a paranoid soldier named Peter who hooks up with a severely depressed waitress named Agnes and, taking advantage of her insecurities, draws her into his delusions, especially those about how the government monitors people by infesting them with mind-controlling insects. 

So the deceptively simple title can be interpreted to mean the bugs that Peter swears he sees all over the low-rent motel room they share, the surveillance “bugging” that he imagines is happening or the fact that he’s simply bugged-out crazy.

Bug originally opened in London but had an off-Broadway run at the Barrow Street Theatre in 2004 and then was made into a movie in 2006. I didn’t see any of those productions but even so I knew that all three featured a breakout performance by Michael Shannon, who brought his trademark hyper intensity to the role of Peter. 

The focus in this latest revival has switched to Agnes, who is played by Carrie Coon, now a big-name TV star thanks to “The Gilded Age” and “The White Lotus” but who is also a formidable stage actor who happens to be the playwright’s wife (click here to read more about how they collaborate). 

That shift works. Particularly right now. The text suggests that Peter is clinically deranged but Agnes is just a sad person, desperate to make sense of a world that seems to have spun out of her control. In other words, she’s like so many of us.

Both Coon and Namir Smallwood, who makes his Peter a more slowly-ticking time bomb than I’ve read Shannon’s was, are fine actors—both are members of Chicago's famed Steppenwolf Theatre Company—and they've clearly given a lot of thought to their roles but I found myself observing how well they were crafting their performances rather than being moved by them. 

I don’t know why that is. It could be because David Cromer, usually a master orchestrator of intimate drama, has been stretched too thin by directing some half-dozen shows over the past year and so didn’t have time to calibrate this one enough as he moved it to Broadway after its pandemic-era run at Steppenwolf.  

Or maybe it’s because the fringe fanaticism that Bug explores has become so much more mainstream than it was 30 years ago that watching it play out onstage is just too close for comfort.  

People on both the right and the left now believe all kinds of things—Obama is a Muslim plant! Trump is a Russian plant!—and are so totally unabashed about spreading their beliefs that I’m not sure how much longer I can stand to stay on Facebook.

However the one thing I don’t doubt is how prescient Letts was about how easy it is for people—average people—to fall into those sinkholes. We’re no longer shaking our heads about how people can be so incredulous; we’re nodding them because we see those people all around us. 

Such farsightedness is what we need from good theater. Plays like Bug and the current revival of Jordan Harrison’s 2014 play Marjorie Prime, which meditates on the growing presence of AI—as well as Harrison's similarly-themed The Antiquities, which Cromer also directed last year— help us to see not only where we are but where we might be headed.  

Of course what we do with that knowledge is up to us no matter how uncomfortable the reality of it may make us.   

 

10 Shows That Meant the Most to Me in 2025

As usual, I’m late with a list of the shows I most enjoyed in 2025 but I’m going to share it anyway and since I am late, I’m also going to cut right to the chase. There were musicals I liked a lot (Beau, Floyd Collins, Mexodus, Operation Mincemeat, Two Strangers Carry a Cake Across New York) and revivals that gave me a whole new appreciation for shows I’d seen in the past (The Brothers Size, Eurydice, Gruesome Playground Injuries, Marjorie Prime, The Weir) but my Top 10 for last year are all original plays because I love discovering new work and each of the following ones, listed alphabetically, brilliantly showed me something worth knowing about the way we live now.

ANGRY ALAN @ Studio Seaview: British playwright Penelope Skinner’s sly satire chronicles one middle-aged white guy’s descent into the most toxic and self-pitying parts of the manosphere and how its insistence that men are victims of society can unleash destructive rage, a message amplified by a terrific performance from the usually menschy John Krasinski, driving home the point that almost anyone can be pulled into that cesspool.     

THE ANTIQUITIES @ Playwrights Horizons: Set in a museum sometime in the late 22nd century, this fascinating cautionary tale by Jordan Harrison (also the author of the similarly thought-provoking Marjorie Prime) imagines a future in which AI has triumphed and humans exist only as figures in diorama-style exhibits detailing how they surrendered control to the inanimate but increasingly powerful entities they hubristically created 

CAROLINE @ MCC Theater: The title character is a young trans girl (beautifully played by the child actor River Lipe-Smith) but the sticking point in Preston Max Allen’s quietly powerful domestic drama isn’t her gender identity but the contrasting—although equally well-meaning-—views of her mother and grandmother about what it means to be a good and supportive parent 

GRANGEVILLE and LITTLE BEAR RIDGE ROAD @ Signature Theatre and Broadway’s Booth Theatre: OK, I’m cheating by listing two entries here but Samuel D. Hunter is one of my favorite playwrights and both of the works he offered this past year—the first about two estranged brothers trying to reconnect and the second about a strained reunion between a reclusive aunt and her disaffected nephew—continue Hunter’s heartfelt meditations on the ability to forgive past sins, although it’s hard for me to forgive the poor ticket sales that caused Little Bear to end its limited run early

THE HONEY TRAP @ the Irish Rep: There have been scores of books, movies and plays about the violent period from the 1960s through the 1990s when Protestants and Catholics clashed in Northern Ireland, but Leo McGann has set his tense psychological thriller years later and focused it on a cat-and-mouse game between a former British solider and a former IRA operative struggling to deal with the repercussions of the fateful decisions each made back during that time aptly named The Troubles 

JOHN PROCTOR IS THE VILLAIN @ Broadway’s Booth Theatre: Both a literary critique of one of the most popular plays in the midcentury canon and a social commentary on the gender politics of the #MeToo era, Kimberly Belflower’s sensational play fired up a new generation of theatergoers as it showcased a group of high school students wrestling with the ways in which the patriarchal hero in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible treated women and with what to do with the similarly patronizing men in their own lives 

MEET THE CARDOZIANS, a Second Stage production @ the Signature Center: Inspired in part by a 1925 Supreme Court decision, Talene Monahon’s dramedy about the struggles of Armenian-Americans to balance the burdens and privileges of racial identity in this country during two very different time periods manages to make serious points about contemporary politics without being overly didactic and while being laugh-out-loud funny 

OEDIPUS @ Broadway’s Studio 54: You may be wondering why I didn't include Sophocles’ 2000-year old tragedy, which has been done 10 times before on Broadway, in the group of revivals I liked but the smart, contemporary language of director Robert Icke’s adaptation and its updated setting to the election eve for a modern-day change-style politician transformed this revisal into an enthralling political thriller. And the performances by Mark Strong and Lesley Manville were so stunningly good that this is hands-down my favorite of the 150+ shows I saw this past year

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY @ Broadway’s Music Box Theatre: I'm not usually a big fan of one-person shows or of lots of video screens onstage but Kip Williams' witty adaptation of the 1890 Oscar Wilde novel about a man who trades his soul in exchange for a life of endless beauty and sensual pleasures, the bravura performance by Sarah Snook who played all 26 characters in the production and the you’ve-got-to-see-it to-believe-it video wizardry by David Bergman had me swooning with delight

WELL, I’LL LET YOU GO @ The Space at Irondale:  First-time playwright Bubba Weiler’s small play about a widow wrestling with the loss of her husband and his death’s effect on their small Middle American community was staged in a church in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn far away from Broadway but it punched way above its weight, in no small part due to the sensitive direction of David Cromer protégé Jack Serio and performances by a cast of some of the top actors in the city, including Michael Chernus, Constance Schulman and an incandescent Quincy Tyler Bernstine

 

Happy New Year!

 

Wishing You All the Merriest Christmas...

 ...from me and some of our mutual friends:

Challenging Power Plays in "The Burning Cauldon of Fiery Fire" and "Practice"

Getting others to see the world in a certain way and then convincing them to do almost anything to preserve that point of view requires a toolbox of skills that include charisma and a fervent belief that one's way is the only right way. And as two recent plays demonstrate the fallout from that dynamic can be destructive—and it can happen anywhere: in a social community, a theater company or maybe even a country.

Thomas, the patriarchal leader of a small northern California commune is willing to go to great lengths to defend the way of life in the sanctuary he’s created with a group of wounded souls in Anne Washburn’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire, which closed at the Vineyard Theatre last weekend. 

One of the group’s survivors, who grew up in that community and who serves as this memory play’s narrator, recalls how its peaceful but fragile existence was disrupted by the arrival of two outsiders and the death—perhaps a suicide, perhaps a murder—of one of them. But although this whodunnit eventually turned into a somewhat confusing what-was-that, the thing that remained clear was how an ideology, no matter how initially benign, can turn ugly.   

Washburn and her director Steve Cosson refused to answer other questions—why the basement door is padlocked, how people just eking out a living manage to buy elaborate costumes for the pageant staged by the commune’s children—but Burning Cauldron dared its audiences to think about how much of one’s self an individual should be willing to give up for what someone else dictates to be the peace and security of the larger community.

Practice, Nazareth Hassan’s cautionary tale which has been extended at Playwrights Horizons through Dec. 19, is more direct about the tyranny it wants to challenge: it’s theater itself. Or, as Hassan explains in his program notes, it's the harmful ways in which he believes some gatekeepers in the theater world operate.

His play centers around the eccentric Asa Leon, a MacArthur genius grant winner who heads up an avantgarde theater company that places great demands—physical, spiritual and emotional—on its members as they devise a new performance piece. 

These selected performers, who are introduced as each of them puts their distinctive spin on the same audition speech, are required to live together and to bare their souls to one another under Asa’s imperious commands. Secrets are revealed, and exploited. Demands, sexual and otherwise, are made. People are intentionally pushed to their limits. Only one opts out. 

Practice places demands on the audience too. The first act runs for two hours and is filled with repetitive acting exercises, including running in place almost to the point of exhaustion (when one character threw up, I wasn’t sure at first if that was part of the script or a real reaction). There are also multiple instances in which director Keenan Tyler Oliphant has the troupe members set a table, eat a meal, clear the table and then moments later do the same thing all over again.   

The shorter second act is devoted to the actual performance piece and to Asa’s spoken manifesto about the kind of theater he believes in. The question of whether he is indeed a genius, a sadistic cult leader or just a manipulative fraud is left up to the audience. As is the question of how much of one’s self should be sacrificed for the sake of art. Or for the sake of anything else for that matter. 

I found both of these shows to be well acted and obviously thought-provoking. But I can't really say I fully enjoyed either because they made me feel so uncomfortable. But I suspect that may have been exactly what they intended.

Thankful Thoughts for This Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving! 

It’s been a crazy month. An avalanche of shows have been opening both on and off Broadway. I’ve seen 20 of them over the past four weeks—some good, some just OK, a few actually great and, to be honest, at least one that was dreadful. But I’ve been so busy seeing them (and trying to tend to the other things in my life, including squeezing in a birthday celebration for my husband K who has very patiently put up with all this theatergoing) that I haven't had the chance to write here as much as I would have liked.

However I did manage to share some thoughts about a half dozen shows on Broadway & Me Quickies, my collection of short reviews that I hope give a sense of what’s good and not so good about the productions I’ve seen for folks who may not have time to get through longer reviews (you can check those quickies out by clicking here).

And last Sunday, I joined my BroadwayRadio pals James Marino, Peter Filichia and Michael Portantiere on the “This Week on Broadway” podcast to talk about a few of the season’s big shows, including Chess, Oedipus and the Tom Hanks’ play This World of Tomorrow (you can hear all of that by clicking here).

Finally, I do try to keep up with the news about what’s going on in the theatrical world and to share it in my Flipboard magazine, which you can read by clicking here. And I've created a Substack archive of all the episodes of "All the Drama," my podcast on Pulitzer Prize-winning plays and musicals (I’m really excited about the one for December that's going to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hamilton and hope you’ll check that out)

So although I’m a bit tired—and despite the ongoing challenges in the world—I’ve a lot to be thankful for, including those of you who read this blog and listen to my podcasts. And I’m hoping that your holiday weekend is filled with loved ones, good food and drink, lots of laughter and maybe some theatergoing too.