The ensemble of Steppenwolf and Broadway veterans, including Blair Brown, Sally Murphy and Ian Barford, play expertly off each other even as they mostly remain in their chairs. Count out the days, and you’ll realize the time is ripe for terror. Booming thunder and zappy brown-outs punctuate the stormy night (conveyed in the lighting design by Brian MacDevitt and in the sound and original music by André Pluess). The municipal meeting hall seems grander than it ought to be, with a soaring arched ceiling that betrays signs of water damage (in a set design by David Zinn). Shapiro, wryly signaling that “The Minutes” has a broader agenda. There’s a deliberateness to the foreboding in this Steppenwolf production from director Anna D. The mayor (Letts) would just as soon move on, and so would everyone else.

Peel missed? It seems unlikely that the clerk who records them (Jessie Mueller), who is curt and fastidious, could be slacking. If each meeting includes a recap of the last, where are the minutes from the one Mr. The story’s deeper and sinister undercurrents creep along from the start, camouflaged in the tedium of process. (Fairy tales and rituals alike love an innocent orphan.) At the opposite end, the eldest statesman (Austin Pendleton) has been serving for 39 years, and could he please have a parking spot to show for it? Seven men (all but one of them white) and three women (also white) assemble for the quorum. Though he missed the previous week’s meeting to bury his mother, he’s sunny and eager and naive. Peel ( Noah Reid of “Schitt’s Creek”) is the freshman of the group and something of a babe in the woods. A play, like a democratic system, is by the people and for the people. Which is to see that there are more radical ways to Letts’s argument and more radical ways to stage it. It’s an argument that a left-leaning Broadway audience will find sympathetic, particularly when delivered in the easeful environment of an expensive theater by a cast that’s mostly white and mostly male. But the desire to turn over Plymouth Rock, exposing Manifest Destiny as justification for genocide, and the equally fierce desire to cling to these myths – seen in the bad faith attacks on critical race theory, the frantic attempts at book banning – have since become everyday news. The arguments that Letts rehearses here might have felt fresher had the play opened in 2020 as planned. (Those moments also indicate why Armie Hammer, the original Mr Peel, accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct, was subbed out in favor of Reid, who radiates aw shucks integrity.) The American experiment, Letts suggests, is a devil’s bargain, which the final moments nudge toward the literal. His earlier play, August Osage County, explored American life through the microcosm of one dysfunctional family, The Minutes goes macro, exploring America’s foundational myths via one pretty functional local government. That’s because Letts positions The Minutes as allegory – shades of The Crucible or The Lottery or Enemy of the People. And the title itself holds the solution.) But even this revelation is largely beside the point. Why? What happened at the last council meeting will of course be revealed later on. The high school football team? They’re called the Savages. Yet even in the bland first half, hints of something darker persist. And in truth, the show is never all that dull, in part because Anna D Shapiro, the outgoing artistic director of Steppenwolf Theatre, has a true-blue acumen for pinpointing the talents of her cast, most of them Steppenwolf veterans, who wring the blood and plasma from each motion and vote. Here’s one: that character is named Mr Oldfield. Many are at the expense of the council’s most senior member, a dodderer played by the beloved Austin Pendleton. There are jokes, sure, though few of them seem especially effortful. On the hyperlocal level, it involves a lot of speechifying, box-ticking, procedure for procedure’s sake. Because wheels of democracy – as anyone who has stuck with C-Span for more than a few minutes can attest – tend to roll slowly, when they don’t get stuck in the mud. Not Letts’s Mayor Superba, not Jessie Mueller’s clerk, not any other member.įor long stretches, The Minutes, is dull, which Letts seems to intend as a feature, not a bug. Where is his friend Mr Carp? And why have the previous minutes not been distributed? But no one is talking. Peel had to miss the last council meeting – he left town to attend his mother’s funeral – and he enters this one slightly confused. He is also, significantly, an incomer, brought to this particular small town, Big Cherry, by his wife. Our guide for the evening is Mr Peel (Noah Reid of Schitt’s Creek), a pediatric dentist and a new electee.

The minutes tracy letts