Belleville

New York Theatre Workshop

(212) 279-4200

***

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“Among the new crop of young American playwrights, Amy Herzog is in a class by herself,” said Richard Zoglin in Time. She has put her uniquely strong grasp of rounded characters and storytelling on full display in her latest work. What begins as a garden-variety domestic drama about American expats working through their troubled marriage unexpectedly makes a turn into thriller territory. Such a shift could easily have seemed forced, but Herzog is “incapable of a cheap effect or easy shortcut.” Revelations about the characters emerge naturally and unobtrusively, with the couple’s little foibles—a marijuana habit, a little homesickness—snowballing into chilling pathologies.

The opening scene provides a first clue that something’s seriously awry, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Abby (Maria Dizzia), a yoga teacher back early from a class that no students attended, catches Zack (Greg Keller) watching porn on his computer. While that “might not even qualify as a marital misdemeanor” nowadays, the couple’s problems go deeper. Zack ostensibly holds a job as a research physician studying pediatric AIDS, yet, as pointed out by his young Senegalese landlord (a “grave, excellent” Phillip James Brannon), he’s four months behind on the rent. At first an easygoing man trying to cope with his neurotic wife, Zack develops so many dark colorsthat when he later emerges from the kitchen with a knife in hand, we “feel a shiver of unease.” And all he’s doing is offering his wife some bread.

You can guess that things don’t improve from there, said Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New York Post. “Herzog has become the go-to playwright for psychological nuance,” but she takes so long to hit her plot points here that the suspense never approaches John Grisham levels. “Underlying the tale, though, is the keenness of observation about how relationships unravel,” said Jeremy Gerard in Bloomberg.com. Keller and Dizzia make their characters unnervingly relatable, with “an easy intimacy that turns sinister as the lies they’ve constructed in place of an actual life come into ever-sharper focus.” Familiarity, in this case, breeds devastation.