When a playwright tells a truly great story, it’s often difficult to review what’s happening on stage. The pleasure comes from watching that story unfold in the theater, not reading about it in a review. That proverbial onion needs to be unpeeled layer by layer in front of a rapt audience that will be both shocked and moved to tears by what’s unexpectedly discovered at the play’s core.
Bubba Weiler’s new play, “Well, I’ll Let You Go,” opened Thursday at Studio Seaview after its world premiere last year at the Space at Irondale in Brooklyn. As with its recent production of Jordan Tannahill’s “Prince Faggot,” Studio Seaview provides an invaluable second look at a very deserving new work.
Weiler’s narrative is most unusual. A grieving widow (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) finds herself locked in a series of conversations with family, friends and even a couple of strangers after the violent death of her husband — and she doesn’t much care to talk with any of them. She is, however, uncommonly indulgent in letting them speak, since they need these exchanges of words more than she does. As an actor, Bernstine appears to be walking upstream in a turbulent river for all 110 minutes of Weiler’s one-act play. It’s a difficult task she handles by taking small steps, parsing her words carefully and pausing only now and then for a needed breath. Hers is a measured performance that reveals much less than it withholds while still being completely satisfying.
“Well, I’ll Let You Go” is basically a series of two-hander scenes with a narrator (Matthew Maher), who, beyond giving us some seemingly superfluous historical details about the widow’s house, has a novelist’s knack for knowing precisely what all the characters are thinking. In a masterstroke of storytelling, Weiler delays the narrator’s identity. Or what could be called his alternate identity.
Jack Serio’s direction isn’t as successful with some of his featured players as he is with the understated Bernstine and Maher.
There are moments late in the production when all the actors gather together on stage, but this is more a directorial touch to move around the furniture and props (scenic design by Frank J. Oliva) than it is any image of community, although it is also that at the very end.
Weiler’s play begins with the widow having an early morning breakfast chat with her emotionally challenged adult son. It’s a good place to start, but playing that son, Will Dagger is a little too effective at not making much sense. It’s the kind of scene that an audience could tolerate if it came much later in the play. Right off the top, it obscures in the way that playwrights, as well as actors, might think is deep and profound. In the end, it’s just dense, as if Dagger were speaking a foreign language known only to himself.
There’s also a misguided second scene. Constance Shulman, playing the very much unwanted mortician, follows Dagger’s exercise in obscurity with a broad TV sitcom performance. Over the years, Shulman has patented her squeaky voice and ditzy mannerisms. She deftly exposes a cold, mercantile mind behind the mortician’s initial wacky goodwill. But Shulman could convey more with much less, and that includes those purple helium party balloons she brings to the widow’s house.
Miraculously, “Well, I’ll Let You Go” recovers from this shaky shift in tone with those conversations the widow has with a childhood friend (Amelia Workman), her brother-in-law (Danny McCarthy) and the teenager (Cricket Brown) who witnessed at close range the fatal shooting of her husband. Most sobering is the visit with that girl’s mother, luminously played by Emily Davis, who was last seen on Broadway in 2021 as the whistleblower Reality Winner in the documentary play “Is This a Room.”
Davis possesses the ability to rivet an audience’s attention immediately, without ever showing us how she manages that feat of focus. Her mother character not only assumes enormous guilt for the death of the widow’s husband, she delivers the play’s gargantuan secret, one that leaves the audience gasping. Davis’ set-up for that verbal detonation is, indeed, breathtaking.
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