There are a lot of small, sincere plays that are also very boring. I won’t name names, because I’m not a complete monster, but, as anyone who frequents the theatre understands, a seventy-five-minute drama with no intermission can last several centuries. So I’ll admit I was nervous when I saw a poster at the Studio Seaview, where “Well, I’ll Let You Go” is now playing,
that described the show as “a fog of grief,” which sounded suspiciously like code for “dignified but dull.” Luckily, that apprehension quickly dissolved as I submerged myself in the patient, meditative focus that is one of the rewards of quiet plays—the sensation of an audience locking in, then submitting, happily, to the story.
“Well, I’ll Let You Go,” written by the actor Bubba Weiler, had a run in Brooklyn last year. It opens on a bare stage decorated with what the script calls “rehearsal versions” of furniture, “not quite right or fully realized.” There are folding chairs and a card table, a reflection of the blanked-out inner life of the show’s protagonist, Maggie (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), a retired schoolteacher who is at sea, unmoored by a personal loss of some kind—and reliant on the people around her to fill in the gaps. Conveniently, there’s another presence lingering onstage: an “Our Town”-ish narrator, played with gentle, appealing authority by Matthew Maher. He tells stories about the characters’ past and the origins of their relationships; he lets us know what people think but don’t say. He also urges us to see Maggie’s space through more generous eyes, by describing a piano that we can’t see, or referring to the card table as a glass-topped showpiece that glints with sunlight at “a weird hour of the day when no one is in the room to see it.”
Then, one by one, guests show up. Maggie—dishevelled, her posture slumped—feels obliged, despite her shock, to be a gracious host, a role that she is both adroit at and phenomenally ill-suited for. She’s a polite person but introverted and skeptical, a doubter in a town full of churchy, community-oriented do-gooders. And, slowly, we realize that what we’re watching isn’t a slice of life but a true-crime story, with Maggie as detective: her husband, Marv, has been killed in a shooting at a community college. Her neighbors see him as a hero, but Maggie doesn’t seem as certain—and the more we eavesdrop, the more unsettling the details appear. Each visitor holds a clue. There’s a sad-sack, conspiracy-minded cousin, whose life Marv and Maggie kept afloat; a bossy funeral director; Marv’s brother (a swaggering Danny McCarthy); his vivacious wife (Amelia Workman), who is also Maggie’s best friend; a former student of Maggie’s who arrives unexpectedly, twitching with nervous apologies (a deeply moving Emily Davis); and, later on, her daughter (Cricket Brown).
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