Dilaria
Written by Julia Randall; Directed By Alex Keegan
DR2 Theatre | 103 East 15th Street, New York, NY
Extended through August 8, 2025
Photos by Emilio Madrid
There is something gloriously unwell at the core of Dilaria, the new play by the audacious young playwright Julia Randall, now making its world premiere Off-Broadway at the DR2 Theatre through August 8. Randall, whose voice is so unapologetically acidic it practically corrodes the stage beneath it, presents us with a jet-black comedy that revels in amorality, weaponized narcissism, and the grotesque economy of digital grief. That her bleak artistic compass has survived the transition from page to production relatively intact is a minor miracle—and a deeply unsettling gift.
Let us say it plainly: Randall’s mind is not a gentle place. It is instead a gleefully warped mirror, held up not to nature, but to our most performative selves—our curated despair, our hashtagged virtue, our yearning to be both adored and pitied in a single post. In Dilaria, she has fashioned a play that is less a narrative and more an exorcism of a certain generational sickness, rendered with impressive tonal dexterity and flashes of genuine horror. That the play never fully tumbles into parody is a testament to Randall’s command of her subject matter—she writes not with moral clarity, but with mordant precision.
At the turbulent heart of Dilaria lies a performance of remarkable audacity and intensity: Ella Stiller, in her professional stage debut, assumes the title role with an assurance that belies her relative newcomer status. To say that the role, that of an egomaniacal New Yorker with a hunger for attention so insatiable that even the death of a friend becomes, in her hands, a springboard for brand amplification, is a challenge would be a profound understatement. When that well of tragedy runs dry, she goes further still, orchestrating a social media resurrection of herself through the ultimate ruse: faking her own demise. Dilaria is a captivating study in contemporary monstrosity—self-aggrandizing, emotionally manipulative, sexually assertive, and unrepentantly narcissistic—the kind of character that demands not only fearlessness but adeep, intuitive understanding of contradiction. Stiller meets the role head-on, with an unflinching commitment that is as riveting as it is unsettling.
There is a magnetism to her presence that anchors the production, a kind of dark charisma that holds the audience in uneasy thrall. She charts the character’s emotional extremities—from icy detachment to volcanic outburst—with precision and ferocity, never once softening Dilaria’s edges for the sake of likability. And yet, there is control within the chaos. Nowhere is this more evident than in her careful, almost surgical navigation of the character’s queer identity. Stiller resists any temptation toward overstatement, instead opting for a performance layered with subtlety and restraint, allowing Dilaria’s queerness to emerge as one facet of a complicated, deeply fractured self. It is a performance that suggests not only raw talent, but a theatrical instinct that is already finely attuned. One leaves the theater less with the impression of having watched an actor “take a risk” and more with the conviction that a formidable stage presence has announced itself.
Opposite Dilaria stands Georgia, her long-suffering best friend, and possibly—though the play teasingly withholds certainty—her thwarted lover. Portrayed with an intriguing, if sometimes uncertain, delicacy by Tessa Albertson, Georgia’s arc is the slowest to unfold. Albertson brings a quietly compelling presence to the role, that of the emotionally ambivalent best friend whose internal landscape is defined by a simmering blend of guilt, affection, and unresolved regret. Navigating a relationship that seems increasingly untenable, if not entirely corrosive, Albertson imbues the character with a sense of psychological realism that anchors the play’s more heightened moments. Her performance is emotionally rangy yet impressively restrained, marked by flickers of vulnerability that suggest a deeper, unspoken torment. There is a groundedness to her portrayal, a lived-in quality that allows Georgia’s conflicted loyalties to register not merely as plot points, but as the painful contradictions of a young woman coming into a fragile, hard-earned clarity. The character’s passive-aggressive complicity in Dilaria’s games is clearly intentional, though the script delays her own descent into the moral abyss a beat too long. Still, Albertson rises to the challenge in the final scenes, delivering a performance that suggests the quieter kind of sociopathy that festers beneath the polite surface.
The ensemble’s touching warmth, however, lies with Christopher Briney, who imbues the role of Noah—Dilaria’s part-time lover and full-time emotional support himbo—with unexpected pathos and perfectly calibrated comedic timing. His line delivery, especially during a tender exchange over the correct pronunciation of his name (“No-AAAHHH”), provides a much-needed dose of human sweetness amidst the gathering storm of ego and decay. It is a small moment, but a deeply funny and oddly poignant one, emblematic of the play’s surprising emotional undercurrents. It is his extraordinary—and, one might say, almost preternatural—capacity to inhabit that liminal realm between adolescence and adulthood: a tender, often uncomfortable threshold where boyish vulnerability collides with the nascent stirrings of manhood. In his performance, we see the full spectrum of that in-between state—earnestness edged with uncertainty, awkward gestures masking deeper emotional currents, and above all, a palpable, aching hopefulness that feels both timeless and acutely of the present moment.
The production’s visual and technical design elements lend an undeniable elegance and cohesion to what is already a strikingly realized staging. Frank J. Oliva’s scenic design—a lived-in, urban studio apartment rendered with a keen eye for specificity—grounds the play in a recognizable realism. Its subtle imperfections, such as the conspicuously absent stage-right wall that leaves the ceiling incompletely sealed, serve less as distractions than as gentle reminders of the play’s constructed nature, a fitting parallel to its themes of performance and perception.
Paige Seber’s lighting design proves especially adept at articulating the play’s shifting emotional undercurrents. Without ever resorting to overt theatricality, Seber crafts a luminous language of tension and tone, modulating the mood with quiet precision. Meanwhile, Lily Cunicelli’s costumes do far more than clothe the characters—they act as visual markers of time’s passage and emotional evolution, subtly reinforcing the psychological arcs unfolding onstage.
Director Alex Keegan keeps the staging sleek and spare, wisely letting Randall’s razor-sharp dialogue take center stage. Her direction is confident without being intrusive, allowing the play’s tonal tightrope to remain taut and tense throughout. Even in the final twenty minutes—when all pretense collapses in a Dionysian swirl of sex, betrayal, and symbolic annihilation—the production fully achieves that deliciously depraved atmosphere it so clearly prepared us for.
Make no mistake: Dilaria is not for the faint of heart, nor the irony-impaired. It is a provocative outing from a playwright who appears to be both disturbed and disturbingly talented. If Randall’s previous play Ransom flirted with unhinged genius, Dilaria doubles down solidifying her status as one of the most compelling young theatrical voices working today. A bloody valentine to performative grief and toxic intimacy, Dilaria is a play that doesn’t ask for your approval—it dares you to look away.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on July 26 2025. All rights reserved.