Did I use the words “inconsequential” and “hilarious” in my opening paragraph? Oh, no, no. It turns out that the “battle,” preserved in a long-buried oral account by the only survivor, was an unprovoked massacre of mostly native women and children by soldiers, one of whom brought back severed ears of his juvenile victims as souvenirs and that the name Big Cherry, long presumed to be a reference to nature (odd in that there are no cherry trees in the vicinity), is an abbreviation of a racist epithet for native Americans. But there’s simply no way to get at just how appalling the last forty-five minutes of the play are without detailing that twist – hence the spoiler alert at the top of this review. Since The Minutes is predicated on this twist in the second half, under most circumstances critical tact would prohibit me from revealing it. Carp (Ian Barford) reveals what he has learned, through painstaking research, about the true story of the battle and the origins of the town. (Not a single member of the expert ensemble escapes embarrassment in this sequence.) Then the play turns deadly serious while, in a flashback that dramatizes the undistributed minutes, the absentee Mr. First, Peel’s admission that, as a relatively recent arrival to Big Cherry, he has never heard of the most glorious moment in the town’s history, a heroic battle against a violent native uprising, prompts everyone else in the room to re-enact it in a burlesque – utterly unlike any preceding scene – that suggests an SNL send-up of a high school historical pageant. Still, we can hardly be ready for the second half, when the play goes bonkers. (Brian MacDevitt designed the effective lighting.) And the audience ought to guess that in a play produced in 2022, the fact that very few among a crew of elected officials even comprehend the need for wheelchair-bound citizens to get access to a public water fountain can’t be merely a tossed-off detail. The ominous undercurrent in what starts out unapologetically as a Preston Sturges-style satirical comedy of small-town manners is accentuated by the unending rainstorm outside the windows and the brief recurring blackouts that the council members attribute to an antiquated electric grid. Whenever Peel tries to stop the proceedings and address the mystery, the mayor (played by Letts himself) shuts him down on one pretext or another. Equally mysteriously, the town clerk (Jessie Mueller) has not distributed the minutes from the previous week that might explain his absence. Peel (Noah Reid of the TV series Schitt’s Creek), who missed the last meeting because he was out of town for his mother’s funeral, is struggling to catch up but hits a brick wall: another member has been unaccountably ousted, and he can’t get anyone to tell him why. Meanwhile the newest addition to the council, Mr. Todd Freeman) to institute a game called Lincoln Smackdown for the annual town heritage festival in which attendees try to knock down someone dressed as Abraham Lincoln (who, in real life, had no connection to Big Cherry). Breeding (Cliff Chamberlain), the most forthrightly insensitive person in the room, expresses it, the definition of “disabled” is an inability to do things that “normal” people have no trouble with. Hanratty (Danny McCarthy) to obtain funding for an accessible fountain in the town center, which goes down because hardly anyone in the room has any interest in Hanratty’s spirit of inclusiveness: as Mr. Shapiro – whose Broadway credits include Letts’s August: Osage County as well as The Motherfucker with the Hat and the beautiful 2014 revival of Of Mice and Men – and a flawless cast flesh out the idiosyncrasies, the long-festering petty tensions and the various ineptitudes of this motley group, two of whom (played by Blair Brown and the delightful Austin Pendleton, whose timing is both eccentric and unequalled) have served on the town council for decades. Working on David Zinn’s evocative set, the fine director Anna D. It includes spoilers.įor the first half of its ninety-minute running time (sans intermission), Tracy Letts’s new play The Minutes (at Studio 54) is an inconsequential but frequently hilarious chronicle of a meeting of the government of a small town called Big Cherry located in an unspecified state. The cast of The Minutes, the new play by Tracy Letts at New York's Studio 54.
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