Review: Enter, Ghost: Love, Loss, and the Perils of Undead Dramaturgy in "Overlap"
Overlap
Written by Erin Proctor
Directed by Dante Piro
Presented by Rogue Theater Festival at The Siggy at The Flea Theatre in association with Abingdon Theatre Company
20 Thomas St, Manhattan, NYC
August 7, 2025
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| Julia Fink. Photo courtesy of Alton PR |
The play opens in familiar enough territory: Maya (Julia Fink), a twenty-six-year-old playwright/barista, and Daniel (Ryan Pangracs), a twenty-five-year-old dramaturg/shift manager, meet while working the same Starbucks shift. Their banter turns into creative partnership, and their early romance moves through awkward first encounters to a shared artistic ambition. However, this would-be arc ends abruptly when a train derailment leaves Daniel grieving and Maya returning as a ghost, determined to see the play they began brought to completion.
Julia Fink is magnetic as Maya. She shifts easily between charm and vulnerability, and one finds themselves legitimately rooting for her the whole time, on both sides of the mortal coil. Early on, she delivers a tumbling, fumbling soliloquy on what it feels like to have a crush, capturing the glow, the excessive Red-Bull-intake-like nervous energy and sudden queasiness of new attraction. Fink plays her with warmth, sharp intelligence, and restless vitality (qualities that remain intact even after her death). Ryan Pangracs soars as Daniel, imbuing the character with a open-hearted sincerity, and hitting all the right notes as a Nice Jewish Boy. His emphatic post-first-kiss confession that he is twenty-five and has never kissed a girl lands with both humor and quiet ache, indicative of the genuine awe and confusion shot through his performance.
One of the most finely drawn relationships arrives late, in Arizona, where Daniel travels for Maya’s funeral. Beverly Blanchette offers a grounded and affecting performance as Marlene, Maya’s mother. Here, the production stages the uneasy coexistence of a Christian funeral and Jewish mourning rituals. Daniel’s recitation of the mourner’s Kaddish is plain and unadorned, his voice carrying the weight of grief without theatrical excess. The reconciliation between mother and daughter unfolds with patience, and audible gasps from the audience marked its emotional impact.
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| Ryan Pangracs and Julia Fink. Photo courtesy of Alton PR. |
The derailment that ends Act One is more than a dramatic turn; it arrives without warning, with a burst of noise, a rush of light, and then silence. Onstage, the moment is staged without spectacle, placing the audience in the same stunned stillness as Daniel. It breaks the frame of romantic comedy and opens the space for something stranger, more searching, and ultimately more moving (a transition of such heft apparent from the audible gasps throughout the theatre).
In Act Two, Maya’s return is marked by a rare “ghost touch.” She can be seen and heard, but contact is fleeting. When Daniel first reaches for her, their hands meet without the resistance of flesh. This moment is staged without movement or visual effect, becoming an intimate reversal of the derailment. Where the crash tore the living apart, the ghost touch briefly binds them.
This thread continues seamlessly into the meta-theatrical ending, when Maya sits among the audience as the play she and Daniel wrote is performed. Her presence collapses the divide between actor and spectator in the same way the ghost touch collapsed the divide between life and death. Completing the play becomes Daniel’s way of accepting loss while carrying Maya forward in art.
Overlap finds the place where comedy and the afterlife meet without giving way to sentimentality. The closing moments legitimately left few dry eyes. It is a reminder of why we come to the theatre: here, veils can be lifted, stories completed, and an embrace, physical or otherwise, can feel real. As has been artfully articulated elsewhere, “Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.”
-Noah Simon Jampol
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