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 is heartbreaking at the center of Ireland’s story; you can see her body, sometimes tensely twisted and sometimes crumpled in dull exhaustion, working through a poison it’s trying to expel. Whatever Dizzia, Chan, O’Connell, and Gevinson bring to the role, there’s a sense that they’ll be bolstered by Maslany’s performance, and that she in turn is drawing strength from the knowledge that they’re right behind her. “You have some nice friends,” Connors’s D tells A at one point. Perhaps that’s what you do with this: Find those friends, take their hands, tell your story.
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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