If there is something beautiful and profound about Bubba Weiler’s play, well, I’ll let you go(The Space at Irondale, to Aug. 29), there is something just as profound and beautiful about the physical experience of watching it.
The audience is seated facing each other in two opposite rows in the cavernous second floor space of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, which may become one of your favorite off-Broadway theater spaces. We see an unprepossessing table and two chairs, with some more chairs to one side, and a small mocked-up kitchen area on the other. Huge, diaphanous white curtains—the kind you first saw in bedrooms in Ian Schager hotels in the early 2000’s—act as boundaries at either end of the space.
The play, directed with a precise care by Jack Serio, begins with a spoken outline of its setting. The Obie-winning actor Michael Chernus, initially playing an avuncular narrator, outlines what our imaginations should conjure: an old house in a Middle American town. Inside this space the Obie-winning and Tony-nominated Quincy Tyler Bernstine plays the just-widowed Maggie, her face and being blitzed with the freshness of grief over losing her husband Marv.
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