Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Cast and director imbue Stefano Massini’s clinical, idea-based 7 MINUTES with impassioned specificity

• By drediman
• April 10, 2022
• No Comments

Italian playwright Stefano Massini made a splash earlier this theater season when his epic The Lehman Trilogy played Broadway for a limited run during the winter months (the celebrated Sam Mendes production previously played New York to great acclaim at the Park Avenue Armory; the staging also has had multiple runs in London). Now, as a follow-up to that three-and-a-half hour play, New York is getting the playwright’s 7 Minutes, which is being presented as part of HERE’s SubletSeries courtesy of Waterwell, in association with Working Theater.

The English translation comes by way of Francesca Spedalieri, who re-sets the play to a rural Connecticut textiles factory (the play was originally set in Italy). Fearing for the worst after the factory has been acquired by a large corporation, the facility’s union council – which is comprised of 11 women – find themselves having to decide, by consensus, whether to accept the new owners’ slightly altered terms on behalf of the rest of the factory’s workers. In obvious ways, 7 Minutes is strongly reminiscent of Twelve Angry Men, as well as the long lineage of Labor-bent plays (the most recent significant examples being Dominique Morisseau’s Skeleton Crew and Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat). Given its homage to existing established works, Mr. Massini’s play isn’t quite the strikingly original theatrical coup that The Lehman Trilogy was, although both are notable for exploring the realities of living in a capitalist society with deliberate, scalpel-like precision.

Also in contrast to the sprawling history lesson that is The Lehman Trilogy, Mei Ann Teo’s production operates on a jarringly small scale. Staged in real time over the course of 90 minutes, Ms. Teo’s taut, claustrophobic staging builds the potboiler tension of the play’s drama expertly. Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of the production is the decision to cast the play with a racially diverse cast of not only women, but non-binary performers, as well. Each one of them – led by the steady, steely Ebony Marshall-Oliver – imbues impassioned specificity to the work’s largely clinical, idea-based debates.

RECOMMENDED

7 MINUTES
Off-Broadway, Play
Waterwell / Working Theater / HERE
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through April 10