Sarah on theater

There exists a house. Maggie lives in the house. Maggie is sad. Maggie is grieving. Maggie’s husband, Marv, has died. Marv died recently. Marv was killed. Marv was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why was Marv there?

Well, I’ll Let You Go clues you in at a steady drip, capturing the fleeting moments just after a loved one passes. You wouldn’t be wrong to say this story is about grief, but it’s really honed in on the front matter: the moment of pure shock before the news sets in and the processing can begin. Maggie’s assembling her first impressions of her new world, and we’re along for the ride, piecing the story together together.

We both have quite a bit of work to do, at that—Marv died under pretty unusual circumstances. Hit by a bullet while subduing a gunman at the local community college, Marv doesn’t seem to have a compelling reason for why he, a lawyer by trade, was there in the first place. This roils the small Midwestern town with rumors, even as they celebrate his outward act of heroism. And for Maggie, it seems to confirm her gut feeling that something was amiss in their marriage. How do I grieve if I don’t know who I’m grieving?

Playwright Bubba Weiler spins tension out of a structural approximation of a whodunit mystery. For the bulk of the runtime, Maggie receives callers one-by-one at her home—family, friends, an opportunistic funeral home representative. They provide little comfort, but incrementally help her (and us) get closer to the truth: who was Marv to this community, what happened at the college, and how can Maggie begin grieving? Marin Ireland (a late-run replacement) keeps us on a knife’s edge as this woman who’s about to snap, and her visitors, especially those played by Danny McCarthy and Emily Davis, propel the story along at an enjoyable pace with a sprinkle of dark humor.

Another thing to note is that we have a narrator, played by Michael Chernus, who drives a lot of the storytelling. At the top, he feels quite a lot like the stage manager in Our Town, which feels, hmm, lightly dramaturgically risky? What I mean is, like—combining an ostensibly omniscient narrator with this slowly unspooling plot can give the impression that you’re having information deliberately withheld from you. It personalizes the narrator, like, “What is the motivation here?” But, in fact, that’s the idea: I felt little moments of frustration and then realized that, actually, I was empathizing with Maggie in doing so. This is cool and feels pretty novel to me! And eventually it gives way to the realization that maybe the narrator isn’t so omniscient; he “just happens” to have a lot of insight into the thoughts and feelings of people in this community.

As a Nebraskan—notoriously a little bit of a fussy one about plays set in the Midwest (and, for that matter, the South)—the setting didn’t significantly enrich the story for me, but I appreciated that its reach didn’t exceed its grasp. It can be hard to realize these places with specificity for coastal productions, but Well, I’ll Let You Go sidesteps the problem by keeping things ambiguous. It’s small and people are just getting by. Got it. Good enough.

The staging is a pretty neat contributor to the sense of place, though. The long traverse stage is very reminiscent of the grand room of a ranch-style home, which feels familiarly Midwestern. It’s used to good effect over the course of the play, as the sympathizers drop by with gifts—flowers, a casserole with crushed Doritos on top, misguided balloons, mulch—which provide a nice visual symbol for the embrace of the community. The sheer length of the stage and lack of microphones make a few lines hard to hear if you’re sitting on the end, and I wish the stage lights weren’t in my eyes, but generally this is a strength.

All in all, I thought this was pretty darn good, but there might be one or two things I would tune up if I were going to launch another production. While the grief/mystery structure was unexpected and I really liked it, the central conceit of a lawyer (who is acknowledged as having done a lot of pro bono work) being on-campus at a college doesn’t feel as suspicious to me as the story would like it to be. I would also consider if the function of the narrator could be telegraphed a little earlier.

It seems like they might just have an opportunity to tweak it, though, if they like; the show has been pretty well sold out since the Times gave it the Critic’s Pick. Could this be destined for a bigger stage? (The August Wilson is currently configured as a traverse stage and about to be vacant—just thinking out loud!) Only time will tell.