As a foreign war correspondent, Marina (Maggie Siff) has put her life on the line to illuminate the darkest corners of humanity. Having just returned from a particularly bloody conflict, she flirts with staying home for good—alongside her cameraman turned lover (Louis Ozawa). With her closest friends and family gathered on the eve of her lifetime achievement award ceremony, she decides to cap this glorious moment with an elopement. But as Marina tries to take hold of her life, she’s forced to reckon with the hold war has on her.
BREAKING THE STORY is a darkly funny and fiery drama about the cost of war and the audacity of those frontliners armed with only a press badge.
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.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
Second Stage Off-Braodway Premiere Off-Broadway |
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