Lumina Viventia
Presented by FRIGID New York as part of The Queerly Festival 2026
Written by Joshua Taylor Piper
Directed by Matt Storti, Hold for photos
UNDER St Marks Theater, 94 St. Marks Place, in Manhattan
June 21 4:30 pm and June 27 4:00 pm, 2026
Joshua Taylor Piper’s Lumina Viventia, presented as part of the Queerly Festival at Under St. Marks and directed sensitively by Matt Storti, is an earnest meditation on love deferred, artistic longing, and the stubborn hope that some relationships may transcend the boundaries of a single lifetime. Set principally in the waning days of Bohemian Paris, the play imagines the end of an era through the intimate story of three childhood friends whose futures are suddenly pulling them in irreconcilable directions. Georges is preparing to leave the city, Rosalie has accepted the respectable marriage expected of her, and the painter Antoine, paralyzed by his own fear, realizes that the opportunity to confess his love for Georges may be slipping irrevocably away.
Antoine is both the play's most compelling character and its governing metaphor. Convinced that great art demands great suffering, he believes emotional wounds are the indispensable price of beauty. Unable to articulate his feelings aloud, he instead attempts to paint them, convinced that his gift lies in capturing the invisible "glow" that radiates from those he loves. His final portrait of Georges becomes less an act of portraiture than an act of confession—a desperate effort to communicate what language has continually failed to express. Piper wisely centers the drama not on whether Antoine loves Georges, but on whether Antoine can ever believe himself worthy of being loved in return.
The production succeeds most fully whenever it allows that central romance to breathe. Ralph Bologna gives Antoine a quiet melancholy that never curdles into self-pity, while Tom Geiger's Georges possesses an easy warmth that makes Antoine's devotion entirely believable. Together they generate a palpable chemistry that gives emotional credibility to the play's romantic core. Annika Solomone's Rosalie provides an effective counterweight, embodying the social expectations that quietly reshape all three lives while remaining sympathetic rather than merely symbolic. Their shared history lends the friendship an appealing naturalness, making the emotional stakes feel genuine even when the script wanders elsewhere.
Those detours, however, are difficult to ignore. Piper reaches ambitiously across dreams, memories, alternate lives, and shifting timelines, suggesting that love reverberates across centuries and continents. It is an evocative idea, but the transitions frequently blur rather than illuminate the narrative. Scenes sometimes arrive before the audience has firmly established where—or even when—they are, and the cumulative effect is less poetic than disorienting. Compounding that uncertainty is dialogue that often sounds unmistakably contemporary despite the late nineteenth-century setting, a tonal inconsistency that repeatedly breaks the illusion of Bohemian Paris.
Yet Lumina Viventia remains engaging because its emotional instincts are considerably stronger than its structural ones. Beneath the occasionally tangled storytelling lies a touching queer romance about vulnerability, missed opportunities, and the frightening possibility that the greatest obstacle to love is the conviction that one has not earned it. The play would benefit from a more disciplined editorial hand—a sharper focus on Antoine and Georges, cleaner transitions, and language more attuned to its historical milieu. Even so, Piper demonstrates genuine affection for his characters and a sincere belief in the transformative power of art. Lumina Viventia ultimately resembles an unfinished canvas whose composition is still being refined: not yet the masterpiece its protagonist longs to paint, but one whose colors already hint at a richer work waiting to emerge.
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Tony Marinelli .
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on July 10, 2026. All rights reserved.
