Joseph P. Krawczyk’s Living the Play manages to do something that very few dramas written to coincide with contemporary events achieve.  Living the Play is actually quite good. 

Living follows the lives of two young Manhattanites as they try to navigate the world after Trump’s 2024 victory.  Chelsea Clark as the Actress/Fiancée and Nathan Cusson as the Psychiatrist/Reluctant Actor/Fiancée do excellent jobs portraying characters trying to come to terms with their emotions following what they understand is a fundamental shift in their world made more dramatic because of the recent overturning of Roe v Wade.    Clark’s pregnant character understands that she has lost a significant amount of autonomy over her body which threatens her ability to make decisions protecting both her mental and physical health. The circumstances fill her with fear. Cusson’s character is more hopeful about the future.  

Both are required to directly confront their feelings because Clark is scheduled to star in an off-Broadway play where her character is facing the same issues she is confronting in her personal life.  Cusson’s character, when asked to feed his fiancée her lines, is unsympathetic to the playwright’s expressed fears resulting from an early miscarriage which might, in today’s world, prevent her from receiving medical help.  He fails to realize that these are the same fears his fiancée has and that puts a strain on the relationship.  Cusson’s character is facing fears of his own.  He has a case of severe stage fright which makes him uncomfortable even reading the play in the couple’s New York apartment.

Cusson, almost from first curtain, seems to channel some of the experience he gathered from playing the lead in Anthony J. Piccion’s autobiographical Autism play A Therapy Session with Myself.  The audience gets the impression that Cusson’s Psychiatrist is a high functioning autistic individual which creates many of his rather quirky character traits and appears to make him less empathetic to his fiancée’s feelings then we might expect from a New York City Psychiatrist. It is a brave choice and extremely well done. Clark, on the other hand, portrays her character with little sympathy for her fiancée’s fears and manipulates him into not only reading for her in prep, but also replacing the lead male in her play.  One often wonders if she really loves her fiancée.

Eddie Lew’s direction, probably because of the restrictions created by the performance space, is, from time to time burdened by “chunky”, slow scene changes, but he does get the right emotional level form his actors.

 Krawczyk, I assume, began writing this piece as soon as Roe v Wade was overturned and went through significant rewrites after Trump’s victory.  Because he makes this a play about his two characters, rather than Trump or MAGA the play hits on almost all of its very salient points.  Like the “Jesse Green review” said about Clark’s play, this is a play that is worth seeing.