I also was there last night.
I’m decidedly less negative about the production as a whole, but aside from Kara (who, reliably, nailed it and I’d be hard pressed to see how Samira would’ve fared), I left feeling a bit indifferent to the production as a whole. The text has a rich pedigree for sure, but it feels set up almost like a series of vignettes with extended transitions between them (paired with fancy lighting design on the outline of the house) than something fully cohered. If I’m seeing a character grappling with the possibility of a fate of a devastating mental decline, I feel like I’d want to see the staging get into their head a bit (the current DEATH OF A SALESMAN nails this) and this instead kept the lens on Catherine’s almost catatonic depression.
I’m not familiar with Edibiri’s body of work outside her voice work on BIG MOUTH, so this is really a clean slate introduction. I feel like she has small flickers of something there, but you could feel a certain uneasiness coming off of her performance. It feels almost like she has certain parts of the play nailed down (her scenes with Kara are actually some of her best moments), but not others and so it creates something erratic (outside of the context of the play). In a season of very big swings, it’s an admirable if underwhelming attempt.
Cheadle has less to work with, but I expected more with him. His approach at times feels more like a reading of the text as opposed to this ever-looming existential threat to his daughter’s sanity, which I feel is something you really have to drive home when you only appear in three scenes spaced very far out. He did have a good grip on the schizophrenic aspects of the character - and you could tell he was masking as hard as he could to maintain some normalcy in the face of decline.
Jin Ha did some pretty good work as Hal, walking that very fine line between being earnest and curious, while also being kind of a dick. He is very calculated in the way he ingratiates himself into Catherine’s life and uses every opportunity to exploit that. I will say the “women can’t do math” trope is a bit dusty, even by 2001 standards, and so that didn’t necessarily endear me to Hal, but I can respect the hustle.
You already know what I’m going to say about Kara - she nailed it and was probably the biggest for to this production. She is a formidable scene partner that, as I noted before, brings out Edibiri’s best moments. She demonstrates genuine care for Catherine, but also acknowledges that she was never her father’s true pride and joy and so everything has a twinge of resentment because she also lost her father (and people have forgotten her grief) and now she has to pick up her sister’s pieces. It’s another score for Kara and definitely another Tony nomination on the shelf.
It’s possible that it could grow over time, but it’s not where it needs to be right now and certainly not at the prices they are asking
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Updated On: 4/11/26 at 09:24 AM
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