Are We in Love Productions
Brilliant Traces
Written by Cindy Lou Johnson, Directed by Shira Behore
TheatreLab (357 W 36th St. 3rd floor, New York, NY 10018)
April 9th - April 26th
Every bit of storytelling through art requires some level of the suspension of disbelief. While a play happens live, and there are real people in front of me, we all know it’s a play. If we’re watching Hamlet, we know we aren't in Denmark. We know the actress playing Ophelia didn’t drown. We know The Ghost isn’t really a ghost. And we know that the actor playing Hamlet isn’t dying before our eyes, yet we are moved. We suspend what we know to be true to allow ourselves to be moved by the story. The more stylized any element of the production, the more we turn off our literally minded brain, and allow for metaphor or symbolism. It is the bargain the audience strikes with the production.
With Brilliant Traces, I did my best to suspend my disbelief. During the opening sequence, when Rosannah knocks the door so hard she almost drops a large flat on a sleeping Henry, I let it go. When she came in like a whirling dervish, but we learn that this anxious energy burst that eventually causes Rosannah to throw herself to the floor, knocked out cold, came following trudging through heavy snow in white out conditions in ballet flats, I let it go. And when Henry doesn’t wake although someone has broken into his home in the middle of nowhere Alaska where he goes to get away from humanity, even though her entrance was about as gentle as a buck exiting through a picture window, I again, sighed, and let it go. But over the next 90 minutes, when the two characters never listened to one another, yet somehow found the energy to yell and scream, I gave up. I could take no more.
This production screams of an acting class exercise run amok. Whether the script or the director is responsible, I’m not sure, but I think someone has done these actors a terrible disservice. Even if the stage directions influenced the performance we saw, the director should have reigned in the verbal violence to allow the play to build tension in some cohesive way. Staged in a traverse, I watched my fellow audience members across the way to see if they were as perplexed as I. When they occasionally let out fits of laughter I wasn't sure if it was nervous tension or they were truly amused. While the playing space was able to create what felt like a one room cabin in an all white space, making good use of an otherwise oddly placed column, occasionally items would fall off a table set against the fourth wall. But that break in the reality is trivial set against the body of the work.
There’s no point in belaboring the point - whatever traces of brilliance there may have been were lost in a production that doesn’t find its voice.
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Nicole Jesson.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on April 25, 2026. All rights reserved.
