In the aftermath of a life-altering event, Pre-Existing Condition explores the challenges, shared community and everyday indignities of learning to move forward. The production will star, in the rotating role of “A,” Emmy Award® winner Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black), Tony Award® nominee Maria Dizzia (In the Next Room), Tavi Gevinson (“American Horror Story”), Tony Award ® winner Deirdre O’Connell (Dana H.) and Julia Chan (Uncle Vanya) in select performances. Ms. Maslany will be the first “A,” beginning on June 7.
Maslany’s performance is raw as others claw at her skin throughout the show, her half-formed answers to questions bleeding out of her. When A tells one date her last boyfriend hit her, he sarcastically chides her, “What’d you do?” Lawyers tell her there’s not enough money at stake to take her case, and mutual friends plead that her ex feels really bad about it all. No one spouts cliches like "you should have left him" or "you asked for it," but they don’t have to; she still feels it. Her therapists (Dael Orlandersmith and Sarah Steele, who bounces among characters with dexterity) tell her as much in suffocating group sessions. The sessions are made lighter for the audience when Orlandersmith and Steele respond to invisible participants with emphatic nods and “mmm-hmm”s, but there is no relief for A — only exhaustion.
An impressive rotation of actresses — Maslany, Dizzia, Deirdre O’Connell, Tavi Gevinson and Julia Chan — is slated to inhabit A during the run: a clever way of signaling universality while adding box-office cachet in these uncertain times for theater. (More on that below.) An equally strong lure is, frankly, the gossip factor: Ireland’s own experience of domestic violence a dozen years ago in her relationship with the actor Scott Shepherd, when they were appearing in a show with the venerable Wooster Group. What makes “Pre-Existing Condition” so powerful, though, has nothing to do with that. It is A’s Everywoman nature, combined with the vulnerable physicality that’s so evident in such an intimate space: her breath, her welling tears, the placating smile she puts on like a demure piece of armor when she runs the risk of upsetting a man.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway Premiere Off-Broadway |
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