The Fear Driving "Well, I'll Let You Go" and "Othello"

A retired schoolteacher, Maggie, sits on a bare stage with rehearsal versions of furniture that reflect her inner emptiness after a personal loss. A gentle narrator provides backstory, reveals what characters think but do not say, and reframes Maggie’s surroundings with generous, specific details. Guests arrive one by one, and their presence gradually fills the gaps in Maggie’s understanding. The play’s slow, meditative focus invites the audience to lock in and submit to the unfolding emotional uncertainty. The central tension connects grief to a universal worry: how well one really knows a partner, and what remains hidden beneath everyday familiarity.

"“Well, I'll Let You Go,” written by the actor Bubba Weiler, had a run in Brooklyn last year. It opens on a bare stage decorated with what the script calls “rehearsal versions” of furniture, “not quite right or fully realized.” There are folding chairs and a card table, a reflection of the blanked-out inner life of the show's protagonist, Maggie (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), a retired schoolteacher who is at sea, unmoored by a personal loss of some kind-and reliant on the people around her to fill in the gaps."

"He tells stories about the characters' past and the origins of their relationships; he lets us know what people think but don't say. He also urges us to see Maggie's space through more generous eyes, by describing a piano that we can't see, or referring to the card table as a glass-topped showpiece that glints with sunlight at “a weird hour of the day when no one is in the room to see it.”"

"Luckily, that apprehension quickly dissolved as I submerged myself in the patient, meditative focus that is one of the rewards of quiet plays-the sensation of an audience locking in, then submitting, happily, to the story."

Read at The New Yorker