Road Kills
Written by Sophie McIntosh; Directed by Nina Goodheart
Paradise Factory Theater | 64 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003
August 15 - September 6
Road Kills—it’s a title that might suggest a splatter of dark humor and visceral grit, but what playwright Sophie McIntosh has conjured is far more subtle, far more startling. In this exquisitely calibrated meditation on grief, survival, and the curious alchemy of connection, McIntosh delivers that rarest of theatrical miracles: a truly original story, born not merely of clever conceit but of deep, deliberate thought. The play traffics in moral ambiguity and road-side decay—literal and emotional. On the surface, it’s an odd-couple scenario: two people thrust together in unpleasant circumstances, performing an even more unpleasant task. But that’s merely the bait. What McIntosh offers is not a buddy comedy with some grit, but a slow-burning autopsy of trauma, denial, and the deeply human need to connect—even over the grotesque.
From the outset, McIntosh declares her intent not with bombast, but with restraint. She builds not with the broad brush of exposition but in gentle brushstrokes—small, halting moments, glimpses of vulnerability, flashes of mordant humor. The narrative unfolds in fits and starts, as though exhumed from under layers of detritus—emotional, literal, and metaphoric. And yet, despite the fractured, episodic rhythm, the play moves with a curious ease. It breathes. There is humor here—honest, unforced—and a quiet, thrumming intensity that never overstates itself. Within minutes, an audience can be utterly disarmed.
The plot, delightfully improbable and perfectly grounded, centers on Owen (played with unnerving stillness by D.B. Milliken), a solitary man in his late twenties, who runs a road kill retrieval service in rural Wisconsin—a business handed down by his father and a vocation he pursues with the solemnity of a monk. Into this odd sanctum crashes Jaki (the electric Mia Sinclair Jenness), a young woman sentenced to six weeks of community service following a DUI. From the start, their pairing feels both inevitable and impossible. He is gentle, enigmatic, with the watchful poise of someone who has taught himself to take up as little space as possible. She is brittle, barbed, a flame licking at everything around her. The beauty of McIntosh’s writing—and indeed of Jenness and Milliken’s performances—is how it never simplifies these opposites, never forces cohesion. They circle one another in wary increments, revealing themselves not through monologue or revelation, but through presence—how they listen, how they fail to. Their job is clear: scrape carcasses off asphalt and carry on. Their task, of course, is anything but.
Michael Lepore has the unenviable task of playing two different characters, both of whom are triggers to Jaki. The first is someone who comes to collect the remains of his dog that has been killed on the highway. She doesn’t allow him to grieve, berating him for leaving the dog off its leash. Lepore’s other role is that of a cousin who comes to give her a lift home, the same cousin that sexually abused Jaki when she was nine. Lepore handles both of the roles with nuance.
Milliken gives Owen a serenity that initially reads as blankness, a kind of benign vacancy. But beneath this calm exterior lies something far more troubling, and more beautiful—a sorrow so private it can only be hinted at. He burns inward, like dry ice. Jenness, by contrast, is all exposed nerve, wielding sarcasm as both defense and offense. And yet, her performance is finely tuned; her transitions from acerbic quip to emotional openness are so fluid you barely notice them happening until they've happened. Together, the two actors achieve something rare: they render mutual incomprehension not as dysfunction, but as the baseline of human interaction. Connection, when it comes, is not the default but the miracle.
The play’s structure—a series of vignettes anchored by voiceover introductions of each new road kill—could easily have felt gimmicky. Instead, it functions as a kind of secular liturgy. Each scene becomes a small ritual of reckoning, not just with death, but with the kinds of damage that don’t bleed. There is a cumulative poetry here, a deepening of emotional stakes that feels organic and earned.
McIntosh’s script reveals itself to be a work of quiet ingenuity—a carefully constructed framework that reflects the episodic, recursive nature of emotional excavation. Rather than relying on traditional scene breaks or clunky exposition to mark the passage of time, she has devised an elegant device: the interstitial pre-recorded vignettes that punctuate each segment of the play. These brief, haunting interludes, realized through a confluence of redolent sound design and the evocative sweep of headlights slicing through darkness, serve not only to demarcate the time between Jaki’s Saturday shifts, but to usher in each new encounter with death.
In a lesser production, these moments might feel like mere connective tissue—practical stage business designed to cover transitions. Here, they become meditative pauses, underscoring the ritualistic monotony of the protagonists’ work while subtly echoing the thematic undertow of the piece. The sound of tires skidding, the sudden thud of impact, the fading echo of a car accelerating into indifference—each auditory tableau renders the moment of an animal’s demise with stark specificity, yet without sentimentality. It’s not melodrama; it’s inevitability.
These interstitials do more than mark time—they create a kind of funereal rhythm, a procession of unseen violences that parallel the play’s emotional trajectory. The lights flash, the sounds roll, and we understand: something has died, again. And just as Owen and Jaki must gather themselves and return to the work of cleaning up, so too must we. It’s a subtle yet powerful dramaturgical mechanism that infuses the play with a sense of inexorable motion—of time passing not just chronologically, but psychologically.
The production embraces minimalism not as a budgetary necessity but as an aesthetic choice. Junran “Charlotte” Shi’s set is marvelously unassuming—a strip of road, a patch of grass, a lone 'deer crossing' sign—but in its sparseness lies its eloquence. Each scene begins with the discovery of a new carcass, courtesy of Sean Frank’s tragic-end props. Sound designer Max Van and lighting designer Paige Seber orchestrate these transitions masterfully, creating a cinematic sense of immersion. Under Seber’s clean, confident lighting, the stage becomes a liminal space: somewhere between nowhere and everywhere. Saawan Tiwari’s costumes are a constant confirmation of Midwestern cold. Goodheart’s directorial hand is light but unmistakable. She threads the play’s humor and heartbreak with such precision that the tonal shifts never feel jarring, only inevitable.
Owen and Jaki, of course, are not just scooping up animals. They are navigating the remains of their own respective traumas—he with quiet, long-absorbed sorrow, she with raw, unprocessed rage. The metaphor would feel heavy-handed in less capable hands, but McIntosh’s writing is so restrained, so uncommonly respectful of the audience’s intelligence, that it lands with poignancy rather than didacticism. When the play’s central revelations arrive (and they do, like a deer in the headlights), they are not plot twists so much as emotional reckonings. What surprises is not what is revealed, but how deftly we’ve been led there.
What emerges between Owen and Jaki is not a romance, but something more fragile and far less theatrical: the incremental building of trust between two people who have every reason not to give it. Jaki, frangible and sardonic, performs a version of herself that’s all swagger and sex-positive deflection. But Jenness allows glimpses of the wounded interior to slip through her armor at just the right moments. Her portrayal is all sharp lines and sudden silences—a performance of great economy and emotional charge. Milliken, meanwhile, plays Owen with a kind of ghostly softness, a man not so much traumatized as weathered into near-invisibility. He speaks in careful cadences, as though each word must be weighed before being uttered. His pain resides in the space between his sentences.
What’s most impressive is how delicately this production handles its darker themes. Trauma, abuse, and one staggering plot twist are all addressed with a kind of austere compassion. The play refuses sensationalism. Even the titular road kill—so easily mined for shock or grotesquery—is handled with care, respect. The damage here is real, but never manipulative. McIntosh writes with surgical precision, and Goodheart stages with an equally unflinching clarity. We are asked to look, but not to gape. We feel the weight of the wounds without being wounded ourselves.
And perhaps that is Road Kills’ final, most moving achievement. In a world where trauma is so often rendered as spectacle, this play dares to offer something quieter: the possibility that redemption may not come in the form of healing, but in the mere act of continuing. Of scraping the mess from the pavement, one piece at a time, and carrying on.
At its core, Road Kills asks us how we deal with the wreckage—emotional, literal, inherited. Do we look? Do we scrape it up, bury it, forget? Or do we linger long enough to ask what it meant? In McIntosh’s world, we are reminded that beneath the silence of small towns and the chirpy cadences of Midwestern politeness lies a wilderness of feeling—and that sometimes, the most radical thing two people can do is tell each other the truth.
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Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on August 25, 2025. All rights reserved.