Theater Review: ‘All Nighter’

If you’re the kind of person who wakes up in the middle of the night with nightmares about an essay you forgot to finish writing, a play like All Nighter is liable to give you stress flashbacks, doubly so if you happen to have gone to college in the early 2010s. In her new drama, the playwright Natalie Margolin is all in on the period specifics. A combustible clique of housemates at a small liberal-arts college in Pennsylvania (Margolin apparently went to Kenyon) have claimed a table in the corner of a big study hall, and they’re staying up for the final all-night session of their college careers. The year is 2014, like really 2014: They drink Arizona iced tea, covet Lululemon athleisure, sing along to Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball,” and eat tons and tons of hummus. I hadn’t previously considered that hummus was the “It” food of the second Obama term, but with the evidence laid out before me, tub after tub, I couldn’t deny it.

Margolin has an eye for vérité observations like that, which makes the first scenes of All Nighter into an amusingly charged group hangout. Though everyone’s nominally worried about finishing their last assignments, Margolin starts the drama at a low simmer: These friends are using the study session as an excuse to reenact rituals, like complaining bitterly about the girls at another table who have always been so productive (every use of “productive” is deeply derogatory), and to stave off the encroachment of the “real world.” The eddying conversations mostly do achieve the feeling of something you’d overhear from 22-year-olds—in some cases, like an exchange about a pizza made from scratch, Margolin tips into exaggeration for comedic effect—which is to say they’re all hung up on minutiae, without frontal lobes well-developed enough to see the forest for the trees. Within all those spiraling dialogues, which director Jaki Bradley has egged up to a Gilmore Girls-esque tempo, Margolin starts to lay out the underlying tensions of the group. There are hints of a messy drunken night the day before this study session, of resentments over money, of girlfriends coveted by others, of miscounted Adderall dosages, and of an abusive ex—all sprinkled within debates about what snacks pair best with all that hummus.

All Nighter’s characters are recognizable types, though well-observed versions of them, each, in this case, played by a young actress porting over some energy from a familiar film, musical, or TV role. There’s the anxious striver Darcie (Kristine Frøseth of The Buccaneers), the ditzy theater girl Lizzy (Havana Rose Liu of Bottoms), the rich type-A Tessa (Alyah Chanelle Scott of The Sex Lives of College Girls), the chill queer team mom Jacqueline (Kathryn Gallagher of Jagged Little Pill), and finally, stuck on the outskirts of the group, the total mess that is Wilma (Julia Lester of Into the Woods and High School Musical: The Musical: The Series). The in-group actresses are serviceably solid in their parts—Frøseth appears least comfortable, playing a character that is also least well-defined—and then Lester cannonballs into the action with a gift of a role that she can play as broad and angsty as she likes. Wilma’s the kind of tumbleweed of unresolved emotion that, in my time, used to be nicknamed a “campus celebrity,” hurtling her way through campus yelling about how she hasn’t slept in days while also making her business everyone else’s, and vice versa. Lester takes the assignment and runs with it, cavorting around the stage in a DIY outfit that anticipates the style of Chappell Roan (the on-point costumes are by Michelle J. Li) while nailing the non sequiturs that Margolin hands her, like, “I want to be a painter… and a Democrat.”

Wilma, as a character, stands out because she supplies so much of the drama. Every time she comes onstage, she stirs the pot and manages to piss off a member of the central study group before sailing out of the room. You need that spike of energy, because Margolin, as All Nighter goes on, resists having her main characters raise the stakes themselves. That may be realistic—part of Margolin’s point is that these housemates would rather smooth over tension than face it—but that choice stalls things out dramatically. As the night goes on, we hear more detail about the things this group of friends would rather not acknowledge, their various betrayals of one another, the ways they can’t live up to the perfect image of best friends they’d like to imagine they embody. By the rule of Chekhov’s sunglasses, if one character (Wilma, obviously) comes onstage with a handful of tinted specs and announces that by the end of the night, “the harsh light of reality” will illuminate the ballroom, by the end of the play, we will see a bunch of wounded characters pouting behind shades. Structurally, the math all checks out, but without the gut punch of catharsis that would actually make it land. I thought of the effects of Adderall, which might be as much of a unifying force thematically in All Nighter as any. The drug focuses you, but in a way that makes everything seem equally important. The forward thrust of a work session can get lost amid the obsessive pursuit of nailing every minor detail—or rather, the central thrust of a play can get lost in its own attempts to render its world just so.

In doing all that detail work, Margolin is too polite and respectful toward her own characters. She feints in some spiky and productively uncomfortable (non-derogatory) directions, but doesn’t sit in them. There’s a tender and tough conversation, for instance, about why one of the group members keeps going back to a terrible man, and it passes by too quickly. Much of the last third of the drama revolves around a lost credit card. Margolin has noted the class distinctions between her characters, but then resists actually deploying the explosion you keep assuming will erupt over money. (We also hear a whole lot about the violation of being robbed, which is fair, but little from the perhaps more fraught perspective of not having the means to keep up with all that conspicuous consumption in the first place.) As the characters kept not addressing these conflicts that simmered but never boiled, I kept thinking that, no matter how many all-nighters you pull, those assignments do finally have to be turned in, and the real world is going to crash through any fantasy, even one as deeply cherished as the lies college friends tell each other to get along. If we’re going to watch those friends onstage, we want to see that collision. We want performance to, at a certain point, hit at something beyond itself. Because what’s “real,” onstage at least, is more than what is exactly mimetically rendered. It’s a deeper, riskier thing, to clearly see one other.

All Nighter is at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space.