After

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

The Wild Project, New York

(212) 352-3101

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For the protagonist of Chad Beckim’s heartfelt new play, 2011 might as well be a foreign country, said Charles Isherwood in The New York Times. Imprisoned for rape at 17 and exonerated 17 years later, 34-year-old Monty seems “paralyzed by tasks that others perform without thinking.” Though he eventually finds a job and makes a few friends, he never stops resenting having been punished unjustly, and the play leaves “the haunting impression that part of his soul will be damaged for the rest of his life.” After’s somber tone lightens at moments—as when Monty is interacting with his new friends, the apathetic Warren and an “ebulliently friendly” drugstore employee named Susie. But unlike Monty, whose damaged psyche is explored “with an admirably gentle touch,” these sidekicks were too obviously created to add comic relief. They lend the play a “synthetic sitcommy quality.”

Yet only on paper is Jackie Chung’s Susie a “stock neurotic pixie dreamgirl,” said Scott Brown in New York. Chung turns Susie into a character who’s “simultaneously exhilarated and stymied by life’s many picayune options: The scene where she picks out a toothbrush for Monty is a tour de force, a blind-alley Google search transformed into comic performance art.” Alfredo Narciso’s more muted turn in the lead role is also marvelous, as “he takes us from fearing him to fearing for him, and back again.” There are deeper issues here that Beckim touches on only lightly, but this play doesn’t need to be more than what it is: a “human-scale social drama, approached quietly, with compassion and courage.”