Still
Written by Lia Romero; Directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt
The Sheen Center at 18 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012
February 6th - March 23rd
Mark Moses and Melissa Gilbert (Photos by Maria Baranova)
I needed to grab my reading glasses to type this up. I had been trying to tilt my head back and look through the bottom of my progressive lenses, but it was giving me a pain in my neck. My perspective changed when I switched. Just as it switched when I first started needing glasses at all. It wasn’t that the restaurant was too dim or the font on the menu was too weird. No matter how much I’d tried to fight it, I’d gotten older and my eyes didn’t care who knew it.
Mark and Helen are older, 67 and 65 respectively. They haven’t seen each other in 30 years. Not since a party where Helen wore a red dress. That night had caused an argument between Mark and his then wife. He had described his ex-girlfriend, Helen as plain, but she was anything but. And tonight, they’re catching up in a hotel bar. It’s 30 years later. The children are grown and Mark and his wife have split. So begins, Still.
In your 50s and 60s, old lovers start reappearing. I thought this made me special at first, but it turns out it’s an all too common occurrence. Either something brings you back home like a Hallmark Christmas Movie, or they cyber-stalk you. And suddenly, you’re thinking “I can’t remember why we didn’t work out the first time.” Hope springs eternal. Helen, Melissa Gilbert, shares a bottle of wine with Mark, Mark Moses, in the lobby bar. The connection is palpable. There’s a kiss, and for an instant those 30 years drift away.
And after the old lovers rekindle their flame, if the audience thinks they’re in for a traditional romance, they are sorely mistaken. This will not be about finding each other and lost time. It won’t be about Helen finally having someone by her side as she faces cancer. This is about the biggest divide in America today, politics. Lia Romero’s script delivers America’s divide with grace and laughter and a ukulele. Reminiscent of Caryl Churchill, her dialogue overlaps naturally, and packs a political punch. How can people once so blindly in love allow the flame to go out? Adrienne Campbell-Holt skillfully steers her actors through their emotional obstacle course. If she doesn’t lead her actors to the edge, we won’t be so invested in whether they stay or soar. Does the audience want them to reunite, to push the politics aside, and find the love they had lost?
Our perspective changes with time. We don’t see the world at 60 the same way we saw it at 30. There’s too much that’s happened in between. It slides us in one direction or another. Helen has been successful on her own. She has learned that the myth about being a spinster isn’t true. 50% of women in America over the age of 18 are unmarried, with that number holding to 31% for women in their 50s. (Those single cat-ladies we’ve heard so much about.) What are we willing to compromise from this vantage point?
Mark Moses and Melissa Gilbert embody these characters so fully that their fame is eclipsed by their portrayals. They are very real and in the moment - vulnerable, honest and explosive. They pull the audience into their night of passion and we ride the roller coaster through every twist, turn, peak and valley. I cannot imagine that the audience was any less conflicted than the characters before them.
This timely production provokes both the mind and the heart. What would you do if given the choice?
Click HERE for tickets.
Reviewed by Nicole Jesson.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on February 7th, 2025. All rights reserved.