And Then We Were No More
Written by Tim Blake Nelson; Directed by Mark Wing-Davey
LaMaMa | 66 East 4th Street, New York, New York 10003
September 19 - November 2, 2025
In And Then We Were No More, playwright Tim Blake Nelson dares to place a cold, metallic stethoscope to the ribcage of a society undone by algorithmic governance and moral entropy. What he hears — and, indeed, what we are made to hear — is not the beat of a human heart, but the impersonal hum of machinery masquerading as justice. This is dystopia rendered not with the blunt tools of melodrama, but with the precision instruments of philosophical inquiry, bureaucratic absurdity, and theatrical unease.
Set in a vaguely defined — and chillingly familiar — future, the two-act drama unfolds within the sterile, steel confines of an unnamed penal complex in an unnamed regime. Here, identity has been reduced to function. We meet no named characters, only roles: the Official (played with unnerving calm by the ever-controlled Scott Shepherd), the Lawyer (Elizabeth Marvel, fierce beneath an icy carapace), the Analyst (Jennifer Mogbock, offering a performance of eerie corporate detachment), the Machinist (Henry Stram, the artisan of death), and the Inmate (a devastating, haunting Elizabeth Yeoman).
The premise is deceptively simple, yet unrelentingly sinister: the Lawyer has been assigned — not hired, mind you, but selected by the omnipresent System — to represent the Inmate, a woman already found guilty of murdering her own family. The case is not about innocence, but method. Her fate is sealed; it is the manner of her execution that is under scrutiny. And even that, one suspects, is a procedural performance meant to give the illusion of choice in a world where every variable has already been calculated.
Elizabeth Marvel’s exquisite portrayal of the Lawyer charts a quietly devastating arc, from reluctant functionary to reluctant insurgent, in a society where individual agency has been rendered obsolete by the cold omniscience of data-driven governance. In this mechanized dystopia — where occupations are assigned by algorithm, actions surveilled in perpetuity, and deviation from the prescribed order punished with surgical finality — the Lawyer initially seeks to extricate herself from a case whose outcome has been preordained. The defendant's guilt, after all, is not in question; the machinery of justice is already humming toward its conclusion. But in her encounter with the Inmate — a fragile, broken figure whose monstrous crime nonetheless reveals fissures in the polished surface of systemic certainty — the Lawyer experiences a jolt of existential defiance. In the Inmate’s suffering, she detects not just a tragedy, but a potential anomaly — a microscopic error in the monolith, a flaw in the circuitry of totalitarian order. And in that infinitesimal glitch, Marvel’s character glimpses the possibility — however faint, however doomed — of resistance.
Upon entering the 200-plus seat Ellen Stewart Theatre, the audience is greeted not with a curtain, but with a vague, distorted reflection — a clever preshow conceit that immediately implicates the viewer. The stadium-pitched seating ensures that no one can escape the sterile eye of the stage. When the trial scenes commence, we are not merely observers, but addressed as jurors, drawn — however uncomfortably — into complicity.
Nelson’s writing, cerebral and exacting, purposely veers toward the oratorical. The play traffics in dialogues that are less about persuasion than they are about exegesis. For those unaccustomed to philosophical theater — or who resist engaging with its moral riddles — these conversations may register as intellectual “legalese” to borrow from a less reverent vocabulary. But to attentive ears, these are the anguished syllables of a society so fluent in data that it has forgotten how to speak of dignity.
Director Mark Wing-Davey stages the play with a cool, distanced abstraction that paradoxically intensifies the horror. Human warmth is doled out in rare, fleeting moments, making its absence all the more chilling. The scenic design by David Meyer is nothing short of breathtaking in its bleakness: massive killing devices descend from La MaMa’s cavernous 30-foot ceilings, their grotesque functionality chillingly at odds with the sterile aesthetics of state-sanctioned death. Meyer's formidable scenic apparatus — a nightmarish amalgam of coiled orange tubing that snakes across the stage like arteries in a diseased body politic, looming vertical shafts, and ominously windowed cells — ultimately becomes the infernal conduit through which the Inmate is subjected to a harrowing and viscerally disturbing vaporization sequence, a gleaming window ominous in its clinical finality. This ghastly contraption serves as both execution device and chilling symbol of a society that mechanizes annihilation with bureaucratic efficiency and aesthetic indifference.
Yet amid this mechanized hellscape, Nelson offers a scene of aching, quiet devastation: a private encounter between the Lawyer and the Inmate, whose mental faculties have been shattered by medical torture masquerading as rehabilitation. Yeoman’s portrayal is a masterclass in minimalism — her Inmate is all tremor and breath, a bird with clipped wings, reduced to gasps and fragments. Her fractured, poetic speech floats above the deadening bureaucratic jargon like a ghost refusing to be exorcised.
The design team deserves full-throated praise for their seamless integration into Wing-Davey’s vision. Marina Draghici’s costumes evoke a world where individuality is scrubbed clean, Reza Behjat’s lighting casts long shadows on a society with none, and the sound design by Henry Nelson (the playwright's son) and Will Curry crackles with dissonant tension, underscoring the drama’s unrelenting hum of dread.
But perhaps the most haunting moment comes late in the piece, when Marvel’s Lawyer — until then a model of procedural composure — suddenly understands the Inmate’s fatal act: a mercy killing disguised as a massacre, a “sugar for end times” gesture from a soul already hollowed out. The fact that the Inmate’s stomach needed to be pumped (she had poisoned herself as well) is not wasted on the Lawyer’s penchant for mercy. The revelation lands not with melodrama, but with the devastating clarity of a final puzzle piece snapping into place.
And Then We Were No More is not entertainment in the escapist sense. It is a stark, unsettling inquiry into the mechanization of morality, the illusion of due process, and the vanishing point of empathy. It will not be to every taste. But for those willing to engage with its rigorous demands and ethical provocations, the play offers a glimpse into a future that feels disturbingly — and plausibly — like now. It is recommended that you do not attend lightly. But do attend.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on October 3, 2025. All rights reserved.