Well, I’ll Let You Go does not, in fact, let go. Not for a moment.
A grieving Midwestern town, folding chairs that feel like an AA meeting, and a play bold enough to introduce a brand new character with five minutes left. Bubba Weiler’s Well, I’ll Let You Go refuses the neat emotional architecture modern audiences are trained to expect, and the result is one of the rawest and most unsettling theatrical experiences in New York right now.
Do you know that thing that happens when you might cry in a few minutes, but for now your chin is kind of crunched up and trembling? I had that feeling from virtually the first scene of the encore presentation of Bubba Weiler’s Well, I’ll Let You Go, which opened at Studio Seaview this week. Studio Seaview is the space on 43rd and 8th that was home to Second Stage Theatre for as long as I can remember, and it is nowhere near the sea, it must be noted. It is a beautiful theatre: large, clean, and spacious for an Off Broadway theatre, and the kind of space New York theatre needs more of. They even have the bar from The Shining in the second floor lounge.
Back to the play. Upon reflection, the title, which I found a little strange and even annoying, a weird little sentence that is hard to remember, is perfect. Because the play itself eludes any shape or structure one might expect. And it is going to make you scrunch up your eyebrows and work to grasp what is happening. I’m stalling, you can tell, because to begin to summarize this piece is to rob you of part of the journey. Something tragic has happened in a small Midwest town, and as the people closest to it come in and out, the day and its ramifications slowly come into focus, and the result is anxious and mournful and terribly human. The play is not meant to be a mystery. Rather, the playwright seems to trust us to be a fly on the wall, eavesdropping as our hearts sink.
Add to the mix, across the board, virtuosic performances from a group of actors who do not mind being raw, real, and even a little strange. Each character brings in their stupid shit from the outside world and, with it, projects themselves onto the main character rather than seeming aware of her grief other than to offer lip service.
The set is another bit of a riddle, with brightly lit folding chairs and tables giving off the vibes of an AA meeting at a high school gym, and the story begins to unfold, narrated novelistically by a congenial middle-aged white guy à la the narrator from Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. As more and more gets piled upon Quincy Tyler Bernstein’s Maggie, more boxes, bags, flowers, and balloons end up crowding the space until they are whisked away for one of the play’s many emotional denouements.
And here’s where we must pause, in the spirit of flouting structure, for a digression. (How can there be many emotional denouements?) Some time ago, there was a screenwriting guru named Robert McKee who began to teach aspiring American screenwriters how stories ought to go. His book became the bible of story structure, and what he dictated became gospel to the soft-brained people who write films for Hollywood, or what is left of it. This has to happen by this page, then we need a reversal by page 21, and there must be an inciting incident by this page, or blah blah blah. I blame McKee for why every American film looks and sounds exactly the same, and for why, inside of ten minutes, the seasoned moviegoer knows how the rest of the film is going to play out.
This may be why a lot of people online are mad at this show, and why I myself at first thought it had ended, beautifully I might add, only to find out there was yet another scene after what we thought was the end. And then another one. With a whole new character we have never met before. With five minutes left in the whole play, we meet a new character. Unheard of! But I cheer a storyteller who doesn’t bend a knee to the plot gods of old and instead does what he feels serves his story. A lot of people are going to be slightly rocked by this two-scene epilogue, and I was getting very skeptical as we journeyed finally into Maggie’s inner life. Weiler and his play earn it in the last moments of the play, where Maggie herself finally gets that emotional release and our quivering chins can finally let go and have a good cry.
