Alyah Chanelle Scott, Kathryn Gallagher, and Julie Lester in All Nighter. Featured photo by Evan Zimmerman for MurphyMade.
Four best friends in their final days of college. A steady supply of drugs. A sleepless night devoted to nothing but productivity — and to inadvertently airing all their dirty laundry. What could go wrong?
So asks All Nighter, a new play running off-Broadway at MCC’s Newman Mills Theater. Despite boasting a cast composed of the who’s-who of Gen Z media — including Havana Rose Liu of Bottoms, Julia Lester of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, and Alyah Chanelle Scott of The Sex Lives of College Girls, to name a few — All Nighter is actually a Millennial story. It’s finals week for the class of 2014, and a quartet of tight-knit roommates is pulling one last (titular) all-nighter before graduation. That involves a veritable smorgasbord of snacks, a dose of adderall (or two, or three), and enough passive aggression to power all the lights in the theater.
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Playwright Natalie Margolin positively nails the quintessential college roommate dynamic. Eating your roomie’s leftover pasta or “accidentally” borrowing their jacket is a painfully high-stakes affair — and of course, in the world of All Nighter, those high stakes are earned by the play’s chaotic conclusion. All Nighter can be cleanly split in two: a hefty first half that’s heavy on comedy and character building, and a madcap conclusion where plenty of plot comes to light all at once to jarring effect. It’s a tad disjointed, sure, but you’d be hard-pressed not to find it entertaining.
The question at the center of All Nighter: how much grace do we owe our friends? As much as the play’s characters call one another their family, at the end of the day, their relationships have graduation as a looming expiration date, and continuing to be in each others’ lives beyond it is entirely optional. They’ve each somehow betrayed another member of the group (though, admittedly, those betrayals vary in extremity), and piecing together the characters’ many mysteries across the show’s 95-minute runtime is a treat for the audience.
Alongside Liu and Scott, Kathryn Gallagher (Jagged Little Pill) and Kristine Frøseth (The Buccaneers) star as All Nighter’s central foursome, each with their own secrets and private opinions on the other girls they share a roof with. But All Nighter, in fact, has an ensemble of five, and Lester as so-called “maniac” Wilma — a fringe friend the roommates are mixed on, to say the least — enters like a wrecking ball.
Wilma is the show’s smallest role, but perhaps its most memorable: Her obnoxiously loud outfit, piercing screams — yes, screams, plural — and over-the-top physicality feel a bit out of place in the play’s otherwise grounded realism. It’s not that people like Wilma don’t exist; rather, it’s a question of why she exists here, in this story with these people, where she adds little to the show’s actual themes. That’s absolutely no fault of Lester’s, though. No, she embraces the outlandish role with infectious enthusiasm, garnering gut-busting laughs and proving herself a comedic actor for the ages. (Sidenote: Wilma’s slow split would be more than worthy of a shantay on RuPaul’s Drag Race — where, matter of fact, Lester would make a fantastic guest judge.)
Another standout performance — one more integral to All Nighter’s plot and most compelling questions — is Liu as Lizzy, who starts the play with high-pitched naivete and ends it with remarkable vulnerability. Liu also deliver’s the play’s ultimate mystery: “I wonder if years from now, if someone asks us about college, and asks us about our house,” she muses, “I wonder what story each of us would tell, and if they’d resemble each others’ at all.”
All Nighter is chaos incarnate, from structure to subject matter to slapstick shenanigans (courtesy of Lester). Sleep deprivation has never looked so stress-inducing — nor, somehow, like so much fun. ♦
All Nighter runs at The Newman Mills Theater at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space through May 18. Tickets are available here.
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