Casualty of War
Written and Performed by Sharon Lesser; Directed by Austin Tooley
Presented by United Solo Festival
Theatre One at Theatre Row | 410 West 42nd Street, New York, NY 10036
April 15, 2025
Photos by Paul Siebold
My favorite theatre experiences begin even before I take my seat. It’s that moment just before entering the performance space—opening the door, crossing the threshold, and being immediately immersed in the pre-show buzz. There’s hugging, banter, familiar faces. It’s the show before the show. And at Theatre Row, it always feels like coming home—familiar, charged with energy, and, yes, maybe a little too loud. Then you settle in, the lights dim, and the magic begins.
Sharon Lesser’s solo piece, Casualty of War, part of the United Solo Festival, isn’t just a performance—it’s an invitation into her living room. Lesser shares her story with honesty and humor, as if she’s sitting across from you, flipping through photos from a life-changing trip to France with her 14-year-old son, Jack. As she recounts their journey through Paris and beyond, she masterfully weaves personal memories with historical reflection.
The stage was thoughtfully divided into three sections: stage right as “home,” center stage serving as a kind of universal space—sometimes a street, sometimes a place for reflection, and stage left becoming the bustling cafés and restaurants. The transitions were fluid, grounded, and never jarring. It didn’t feel like watching a traditional play. It felt intimate. Real. Especially as Lesser shared the fraught yet familiar emotional roller coaster of traveling with a teenager.
As someone who has visited many battlefields and memorials, I felt a deep resonance as she described her time at Omaha Beach—one of the D-Day landing sites—caught between the weight of history and the swirl of real-time family conflict. You reflect on the magnitude of loss: the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, the fallen soldiers, the shadows of anti-Semitism that persist. Even as she seeks refuge in the Rodin Museum, she finds Camille Claudel—a brilliant sculptor and Rodin’s muse— yet another woman discarded by the patriarchy, her genius largely unrecognized in her lifetime.
There are moments when Jack scolds his mother—for being “disrespectful,” for being too maternal or for not approving of how she is experiencing the trip. The audience responded with knowing laughter and groans, a communal understanding of the delicate dance of parenting teenagers.
But it’s the title—Casualty of War—that lingers. Lesser prompts us to explore its many dimensions:
Are we casualties of the wars within our own families?
Of the generational trauma handed down from those who lived through world-altering violence?
Of the quieter, daily assaults—microaggressions, slights, and dismissals that chip away at our sense of belonging?
She touches on the science and poetry of trauma—epigenetics, inherited memory—and asks the questions that myself and many others who knows their percentages:
Can we break the cycle?
Do we carry our ancestors’ pain in our DNA?
Are we destined to repeat their suffering, or can we learn to heal through reflection, storytelling, and radical empathy?
Casualty of War is a moving, beautifully crafted solo show. It doesn't offer easy answers—but it asks all the right questions. And maybe, just maybe, it helps us find our way forward.
This piece is a must-see.
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Malini Singh McDonald.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on April 9th, 2025. All rights reserved.