Review Roundup: THE COAST STARLIGHT Opens At Lincoln Center Theater

Lincoln Center Theater presents THE COAST STARLIGHT. The new play is written by Keith Bunin, directed by Tyne Rafaeli. The play opened on Monday, March 13 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. Read reviews for the production!

THE COAST STARLIGHT features Mia Barron, Camila Canó-Flaviá, Rhys Coiro, Will Harrison, Jon Norman Schneider, and Michelle Wilson. The play has sets by Arnulfo Maldonado, costumes by Ásta Bennie Hostetter, lighting by Lap Chi Chu, original music and sound by Daniel Kluger, and projections by 59 Productions. Melissa Chacón is the Stage Manager.

In Keith Bunin's new play, a young man armed with a secret that can land him in terrible trouble boards The Coast Starlight, the long-distance train that runs from Los Angeles to Seattle. With the help of his fellow travelers, all of whom are reckoning with their own choices, he has roughly one thousand miles to figure out a way forward. The Coast Starlight is a smart, funny, and compassionate story about our capacity for invention and re-invention when life goes off the rails.

Alexis Soloski, The New York Times: A gentle, rueful play, directed with a steady and sympathetic hand by Tyne Rafaeli, it settles down among six passengers sharing a single coach. Narrow, nimble, self-contained, the ride it offers is as smooth as it is wistful. Because Bunin ("The Credeaux Canvas," "The Busy World Is Hushed") knows that any trip involves leaving something or someone behind.

Jackson McHenry, Vulture: The characters reveal their backstories one by one without going very deep. You want a bigger surprise from each character beyond the broader types that Bunin introduces, because the play's premise implies that there ought to be more to learn in talking than in merely observing. But the conversation doesn't deliver much. Aside from Mia Barron, playing a woman who storms onto the train and delivers a whole bravura monologue about a break-up at the Esalen Institute (I could watch a whole play about her character's crunchy gripes), the actors don't make significant impressions. Tyne Rafaeli, directing, keeps the action among chairs laid out on a square platform onto which there are projections of blurry color that you might see out of a train window. Intentional or not, the effect coaxed me toward zoning out. I started to fantasize, in fact, about how relaxing it might be to go on a long, quiet trip by train.

Tim Teeman, The Daily Beast: The Coast Starlight perfectly captures this clash and melding of private and public, the spoken and silent, when traveling. The play makes all our inner voices become outer, and examines what we think of others without knowing a thing about them-and what we get very right, and very wrong.

Frank Scheck, New York Stage Review: More often than not, however, there are no possibilities at all. We might engage in some quick small talk, or just sit and look at our fellow passengers and wonder who they are and what their lives are like. That's the conceit of Keith Bunin's affecting new drama now playing Off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater's Mitzi Newhouse after premiering in 2019 at San Diego's La Jolla Playhouse. Nothing of any real consequence happens in The Coast Starlight, except that we get to know and thoroughly enjoy the company of its characters - who never get to know each other except in their imaginations.

Howard Miller, Talkin' Broadway: Projected images representing flying-by scenery, along with seating arrangements that occasionally move about the stage into different configurations, help with the illusion that pretty much everything we see and hear exists only in the not-altogether-reliable recollections and invented conversations from the mind of the troubled T. J. But beyond that, there's not a lot for us to latch onto. Except for the unpredictable mayhem that is Mia Barron's Liz, the characters are not interesting enough for even Jane to want to sketch, and the 95-minute production of The Coast Starlight makes for a long train ride.