Breaking the Story Off-Broadway Reviews

Except for Halston, who is incapable of not grabbing an audience, there’s little the cast can do to make this material feel full or fresh. Even Bonney, a director with miles of excellent productions to her credit — including “Mlima’s Tale” and “Cost of Living” — resorts to too many clichés. (The sound design, by Darron L West, and the projection design, by Elaine J. McCarthy, are especially obvious.) And a Hail Mary pass toward tragedy in the last moments of the play feels like an incomplete.

One of the problems with the play, which never seems to find a consistent tone or narrative coherence. Periodically throughout the lighthearted interactions among the characters, Marina experiences memories of past traumas, conveyed by the sound of numerous loud explosions that might induce PTSD in audience members as well. There are also flashbacks to her wartime experiences, including a sad encounter with a refugee (also played by Halston.) More confusingly, some scenes are repeated, as if Marina is suffering from déjà vu, and others feature characters talking about her as if she wasn’t there, to which she reacts with understandable annoyance. Later on, yet another character briefly appears: Fed (a dashing Matthew Saldivar), Marina’s ex-husband and fellow war correspondent who now wants her back.

Alexis Scheer’s new play, “Breaking the Story,” begins with a bang, literally, and features several more before its roughly 80 minutes have expired. The central character, Marina, is a veteran foreign correspondent who clearly suffers from PTSD. We meet her in an unnamed war zone as she tries to report between missile strikes; yet the explosions continue intermittently, as flashbacks, even after she has moved to more peaceful surroundings — a house with a garden at Wellesley, Massachusetts — to ponder early retirement. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of figurative whimpering between the blasts. Ms. Scheer earned acclaim several years ago with “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord,” another play that carries into an idyllic suburban setting ghosts of terror from abroad; in that work, a group of seemingly privileged teenage girls gathers in a treehouse to summon the ghost of a notorious Colombian cartel leader, Pablo Escobar.

The play's willingness to tackle knotty contradictions feels necessary, but then these explorations don't mesh with the closing imagery, which frames Marina — inadvertently — as a symbol for war correspondents. The rapid transition between the story of a fictional, white, female journalist and the post-show memorial honoring fallen war correspondents (bearing a diversity of names) lands as a miscalculation.

Jo Bonney’s flat, face-value staging only underscores the glibness of the script (the overarching it-was-only-a-death-dream conceit apparently gives Scheer the freedom to indulge in clunkers and cliches). The Second Stage Theatre production design is crisp and mostly effective, with Cho’s prim deconstruction of a grassy lawn and appalling detonations simulated by Jeff Croiter’s harsh lighting and Darron L. West concussing sound effects. The overqualified cast does what it can with a flimsy dramaturgical conceit. You feel for them. When a show squanders Halston, Carr, Ashe, and the magnetic Siff in such pseudo-topical trifle, it’s a criminal misuse of great women—even if it doesn’t rise to a war crime.