Walden Off-Broadway Reviews

Despite the hat tip to Thoreau in its title, “Walden” eventually goes full soap opera. Its crisis isn’t so much about forcing Stella to choose between Mars and Earth as about forcing her to choose between Cassie and Bryan. The performances often lean overbroad too, laboriously alternating between breeziness and dudgeon. Only Winters, always an expert at making contradictions emulsify, is convincing — if not overall, then moment by moment.

The title, of course, refers to Henry David Thoreau’s paean to the beauties of the natural world; in the context of the play, it is also the name of the Mars habitat that Stella designed before her career at NASA was derailed. Ultimately Ms. Berryman’s drama is more successful as an exploration of knotty family conflicts than it is persuasive as a dystopian view of mankind’s in-the-offing predicament. Her dire vision is occasionally undermined by detail: If the world were really in such a parlous state, one can’t but wonder how Stella and Bryan have managed to collect such a well-stocked wine cellar.

Unfortunately, the play’s vaguely sci-fi aspects feel woefully underdeveloped, mainly serving as a flimsy springboard for the generic interpersonal dynamics among the trio, including the hint of an attraction between Cassie and Bryan and a revelation about a tragedy in Bryan’s recent past. Despite the occasionally trenchant dialogue and welcome doses of humor, neither the characterizations nor situations are developed sufficiently to hold our interest. Running a mere 90 minutes, Walden lacks the seismic punch to gets its points across quickly and would have benefited from a greater fleshing out.

Thanks to Rossum’s and Winters’ fearless performances, and the smooth direction of Whitney White (Jaja’s African Hair Braiding), we see the distance between the siblings, but we also see the indissoluble attachment. (Hard to believe that Rossum, who spent nine seasons on the Showtime black comedy Shameless, is making her off-Broadway debut.) And hat tip to casting director Taylor Williams: Rossum and Winters actually do look like twin sisters.

These characters are surrounded by Matt Saunders's set design, a marvel. The cabin is armored in corrugated iron and furnished with all the homey trimmings of a fancy, off-the-grid Airbnb, and you can play find-the-hidden-object during moments of prolonged sisterly bickering. It’s during these times that the play deviates from its namesake — a book written by the American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau, who wrote his Walden after spending two years alone in a self-built cabin to live a simple life of spirituality and environmentalism. Thoreau, however, did not have his sibling with him.