The Brooklyn Rail

There is a lived honesty to Bubba Weiler’s writing, which settles cozily into its regional setting like sitting back on the family couch. What Samuel D. Hunter does for Idaho and Angus MacLachlan for North Carolina, Weiler does for his “medium-sized town in the Midwest,” the setting for his new play, Well, I’ll Let You Go.

Within that town is a specific house.

“The most important piece of furniture in the family room is a glass-topped circular table,” a man (Michael Chernus) tells us. “This is where you’d play a game of Scrabble. If there was— say—guacamole, it would be set out here.”

Such writing has a plainspokenness so clean it sings. And Chernus, known for playing amiable loafers on Severance and Orange Is the New Black, here takes on a narrating directness that would make him pH 7-neutral if it weren’t for his ineffable warmth.

The difficulty with precise plays is the finer they are, the more apparent their waverings. Weiler’s play largely avoids them.

Now extended at The Space at Irondale through September 12, Well, I’ll Let You Go traces the days after Maggie (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) loses her husband, and a community loses its fixture. The exact circumstances around his heroic death—which seem to involve a gun, a girl, and a college campus—are murky, inviting Weiler to weave a tapestry of overlapping perspectives only for him to gently tug at its tethers; then, his community can decide if it wants to unravel.

The characters’ plainspokenness means, ironically, the obvious is seldom discussed. This succeeds on two fronts: First, some of the characters are Catholics, so a shrouding of feelings is culturally correct. Second, this lets Weiler fashion a mystery for Maggie—and the audience—to solve. What happened to her husband?

Scene after scene, the play’s cast, sprawling as the heartland, takes turns visiting Maggie. A clearer picture emerges: her husband’s death is related to a controversial abortion clinic, religious fanatic, and school shooting. Weiler never abuses the pathos of these topics; instead, he takes what has become the unforgivable everyday in the United States and makes it wallpaper.

People do know what they’re living through. What they don’t know how to handle is death.

A microstudy in grief, Well, I’ll Let You Go offers Bernstine a plum role and gray areas to navigate. Thank goodness she’s a brilliant pilot.

How much did Maggie love her husband? How much does she love her husband now that he is gone? Who are these people who keep calling and visiting to offer condolences? Does she want them to stay longer or just leave? And could they bring something other than casserole?

A cherry-picked cast comes and goes, each actor getting a scene. There’s an aimless drifter who can’t get out of his own way (Will Dagger), a daffy funeral home director who has rug samples so Maggie “can choose shoes that won’t clash” (Constance Shulman), the grieving brother who a Miranda July character would immediately peg as moronic, and fall in love with anyway (Danny McCarthy).

College professors, take note: acting students will flock to perform these scenes.

Then there’s Emily Davis’s.

Playing the fragile Angela, the mother of a girl Maggie’s husband knew, Davis re-embodies the nervousness that made her Reality Winner in Is This a Room so striking. Weiler gives Angela a small connection to Maggie that reveals so much: she was her grammar school student.

“You probably only remember the smart ones,” Angela says.

A whole world opens. Until now, Maggie has had one defining identity: widow. She was a teacher. Angela struggled in class. Sometimes, people get out, and sometimes, decades later, they are right where you left them.

Their scene crackles as they try to understand what the other person wants; it also gets interrupted.

Weiler employs a device throughout his play where Chernus bookends scenes with commentary. He also speaks in the middle of them as an omniscient narrator. It distracts.

Angela tells Maggie how she saw her, as a teacher. Between Angela finding how to express her appreciation, Chernus cuts in: “Maggie suddenly remembers a little girl—tears in her eyes—clearing out her desk while her mother waited at the classroom door.”

Such asides happen multiple times, flattening scenes’ momentum, deflating their tension, and, worse, telegraphing that which Bernstine so expertly communicates in her silence.

Maggie is not a flashy role, and few play grounded like Bernstine. Often the receiver of visitors’ feelings and monologues, she spends much of the show listening. In a tonally similar play, Corsicana by Will Arbery, Deirdre O’Connell listened as Dagger shared an expansive speech about a letter that magically went missing. In that scene, O’Connell barely spoke but she was Dagger’s equal, her expressions as rapturous as Dagger’s storytelling.

Here, Bernstine is still magnetic; there’s just a nearby force pulling focus. It can lean invasive: a man—spectral, yes—tells the audience the thoughts inside a woman’s head.

“Maggie felt—for the first time—a love she thought could last their lifetime,” one such line goes. It calls to mind Fire Island, in which Joel Kim Booster’s voiceovers talk about a sunset over—in film’s visual medium—that very sunset. The Apple logo is just an apple; there is no written “apple” with it.

This is ultimately a small quibble in an otherwise keenly observed chamber drama. And, thankfully, it’s impossible to gripe about Chernus’s endearing performance.

The production is also near faultless. Director Jack Serio is a shining interpreter of the plain; as displayed in Hunter’s Grangeville, he hones careful and imperceptible performances, making it feel as if he’s gotten out of the actors’ ways. Also like with that play, this one features a scenic shift.

In Frank J. Oliva’s understated scenic design, that glass table Chernus mentioned gets a cameo, as does a piano. In a gesture that feels special, the two household objects also compete: which is the object to share? The piano, whose keys are passingly tickled, becomes secondary.

There is a scene in Barry Jenkins’s film If Beale Street Could Talk where its lovers look at an empty apartment. The camera follows the man’s voice as he paints an image of what the humble home could become. It is simple and moving, much like a moment in Weiler’s play and Serio’s production.

At one point, all the characters you’ve met return and clear the stage. Time has rewound, the home is a blank canvas, and Chernus—Maggie’s husband—tells her how full it could be. Can Maggie see that? How will her decades fill this space?

Well, I’ll Let You Go examines a woman growing into her place in her home. In the quiet of it, with one resident now gone, Maggie listens to her home, and sometimes speaks back to it. Things that are very hard to find words for, Weiler does.