If there is something beautiful and profound about Bubba Weiler’s play, well, I’ll let you go (The Space at Irondale, to Aug. 29), there is something just as profound and beautiful about the physical experience of watching it.
The audience is seated facing each other in two opposite rows in the cavernous second floor space of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, which may become one of your favorite off-Broadway theater spaces. We see an unprepossessing table and two chairs, with some more chairs to one side, and a small mocked-up kitchen area on the other. Huge, diaphanous white curtains—the kind you first saw in bedrooms in Ian Schager hotels in the early 2000’s—act as boundaries at either end of the space.
The play, directed with a precise care by Jack Serio, begins with a spoken outline of its setting. The Obie-winning actor Michael Chernus, initially playing an avuncular narrator, outlines what our imaginations should conjure: an old house in a Middle American town. Inside this space the Obie-winning and Tony-nominated Quincy Tyler Bernstine plays the just-widowed Maggie, her face and being blitzed with the freshness of grief over losing her husband Marv.
In 2024, Bernstine’s Tony nomination came for playing Mrs. Miller in John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt: A Parable—a mother willing to overlook something terrible for what she considers to be a greater good. In well, i’ll let you go, the truths prove more insistent to ignore.
Maggie must deal with the presences of a family friend in dire need (Will Dagger), a funeral director armed with purple balloons and unwelcome advice (Constance Shulman), and a friend (Amelia Workman) who is married to Marv’s brother (Danny McCarthy), both of whom are hiding secrets. Beyond what the characters talk about, Chernus divulges bits of information beneath what is left unsaid between the characters: secret passions, unspoken suspicions and assumptions, buried resentments, and hidden vulnerabilities.
We follow Maggie’s pained gaze leveled at the other characters as she suspects them of lying or withholding information from her. Every one of the actors, in their capsule scenes with her, tells whole stories in minutes.
The intensity of Maggie’s grief—we see it literally weigh Bernstine down, as if she is dragging chains behind her—is compounded by confusion over why Marv died in the way he did—a hero in a bloody tragedy that is garnering media attention. The strangeness of these circumstances leads her to ask who he really was, and what their marriage really was. Here, two final characters, a mother and daughter played by Emily Davis and Cricket Brown, provide vital information to a flailing Maggie.
If there has been a spare and stark beauty to the play to this point, Serio opens up both the space in front of us after Maggie learns the truth about her husband.
We witness a silent ballet of one character being stripped and clothed as the stage is cleared, the play then journeying back in time to when Maggie and Marv first found this house we have all imagined. Then suddenly those Schager-esque curtains part and it is furnished anew, meaningfully differently. The forces of time, love, and loss are suddenly, heart-thuddingly visible.
Throughout the play, the audience is as brightly lit as the actors. The implication, or expectation, is that they are as involved in the construction of the story as the actors on stage.
This untraditional intimacy echoes the memorable setting of Serio’s last show, Danger and Opportunity, where the audience sat in the same, small apartment-like room as a throuple getting together and breaking up.
In well, I’ll let you go, we feel just as disconcertingly close to Bernstine’s fine study of grief and catharsis, with Serio and Oliva helping to ensure that the audience witnesses both the deconstruction of her memories, then their reconstruction. The fact we are in a church for this moment of transformation and transfiguration ensures well, I’ll let you go lands even harder.
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