#The minutes broadway cast movie#

Peel is a new council member who missed the previous week’s meeting to attend his mother’s funeral. Peel, played by the eminently likable Noah Reid of Schitt’s Creek fame. We experience the story through the eyes of Mr.

We get repeated hints of some intrigue concerning an absent council member and the missing minutes from the previous meeting.Ībout halfway through, the events of The Minutes take a turn for the quizzical when the council members rise to reenact the story of one of the town’s seminal events, the one that the aforementioned fountain commemorates. The Minutes takes place mostly in real time - with one significant flashback - at the weekly meeting of a town council in Big Cherry, which one of the characters describes as “a wet sock of a town.” For the first half hour or so, the dialogue concerns the quotidian minutiae of small town life: stolen bicycles, parking spaces, a proposed redesign of a fountain in the town center. It didn’t take long to figure out what the jarring finale was meant to convey (more on that later), but the experience was thoroughly unsettling. But, by the end of the evening, chances are the unsettling shift in tone and style will either leave you overpowered - or scratching your head, as I was. The script starts off as a slice-of-life play, thoroughly mundane and expository, the action dry and workaday as its title.

I’m not entirely sure what I was expecting, but The Minutes certainly wasn’t it. But I saw The Minutes when it finally opened on Broadway earlier this month. However, I had to wait to experience the Steppenwolf Theater Company’s staging of the play when, in the spring of 2020, the Broadway run suddenly shut down in previews because of the Covid pandemic. I also genuinely appreciated Letts’s 2019 play Linda Vista, a compelling character study centered around Ian Barford’s intensely human performance as a sad man frustrated with his own contrary nature.Īdvance word about the 2017 Chicago production of The Minutes had been strong.

In August, Letts was able to mix horrifying proceedings and reprehensible people into an intoxicating concoction that belied its prodigious three-hour length. I had greatly enjoyed Letts’s Pulitzer Prize-winner, August: Osage County, which remains one of my favorite nights in the theater. And the feeling that came upon me after the final minutes of the play was … befuddlement. I thought about that exhortation immediately after watching The Minutes, the new Broadway play from Pulitzer-winner Tracy Letts. I would exhort students to then think about where that reaction came from and start building their case for or against the work that they’re evaluating based on that feeling.

#The minutes broadway cast movie#

When I’ve taught courses in arts criticism, I’ve often recommended that students start crafting their reviews around the feeling that the show or book or movie left them with. Blair Brown and Austin Pendleton in The Minutes. At Studio 54, 254 West 54 Street (between Broadway & 8th Avenue), NYC. Pulitzer Prize-winner Tracy Letts’s new Broadway play features an intriguing premise and a shocking denouement.