Review: "The Goo" Mesmerizes; Oozes Anxiety; Drips Invective

The Goo

Written by K. Rose Dallimore

Presented by New Relic Theatre at The Chain Theatre

312 W 36th St. 4th floor, Manhattan, NYC

September 18-28, 2025

The cast of The Goo. Photo by Noah Simon Jampol

Friendships fray and ontology is implicated under the innocuous enough auspices of six friends meeting for an annual Prospect Park picnic-cum-reunion in in K. Rose Dallimore’s brilliant original work The Goo. Inspired by The Importance of Being Earnest, Dallimore’s 90-minute, 2-act play is as much Rod Serling as Oscar Wilde. The Goo is fearless, unrelenting, disquieting, and damn funny. No ideology or identity is given quarter as Dallimore deftly skewers even our most sacred social conventions. There is mastery here, almost a sleight of hand: just when thematics and narrative stability feel most secure, and the audience most self-satisfied, the ground (or the picnic blanket in this case) gives way. No narratological or ideological creature comforts sustain once things get surreal, once we pierce the veil and “people stop being polite and start getting real.”

The play begins with that annual picnic: six twenty-somethings stitched together with small talk, inside jokes, and the half-teasing affection of long (if weathered) friendship. They bicker, flirt, trade gossip and barbs, and circle endlessly around the absent “June,” a friend who exists more as convenient excuse than reliable presence. “We all used June. To get out of things, to get by. Doesn’t that make her real?” Lo asks, a line that distills the group’s uneasy bargain with “June” and each other. What begins as banter thickens into unease, stories piling up and inconsistencies tangling until the storm clouds arrive.

Dallimore renders the scene with exacting verisimilitude. All matter and manner of manners are on display. Trader Joe’s canvas and Hermann Hesse. A blanket spread over a tattered patch of green, a bottle of wine (never a corkscrew), and an eccentric friend’s contribution to the picnic menu: a 50-piece bucket of chicken nuggets. The tableau is familiar, innocuous, and all the more menacing for it. 

As clouds thicken and the goo gathers, comic rhythms yield revelation. One by one, the friends admit to lies and evasions. Then June herself appears, chthonic and unsettling, forcing them, and us, to reckon with what is real. The friends’ repartee, once comic, sharpens into something now more biting. “You don’t even believe half the things you say,” Jaida lofts. “Better than never saying anything worth believing,” Ricky volleys. And just as the play threatens to settle into mere metaphor, pink clouds form overhead, releasing sticky goo that hurls the group into chaos and catharsis.

The cast of The Goo. Photo by Noah Simon Jampol

The ensemble makes this setup sing. What could easily feel like sitcom “group reunion” schtick or Brooklyn Gone Wilde becomes electric, driven by a sense of competition in every exchange. Each character strives to “win” the banter, to top the last joke, to hold the floor. Once the surreal shift occurs, the audience is suddenly left wondering what exactly was being won. Intimacy? Authority? Power? Escape? The script’s mastery lies in how precisely it draws us into those games and how abruptly it takes them away.

Within that charged ensemble, several performances shine with particular force. Kelsey Malanowski’s June carries the narrative’s heaviest burden, and she does so with commanding magnetism, shifting between charm and menace in a way that renders the character’s very existence destabilizing. Daniel Ison brings Ricky to vivid life, his comedic timing anchoring the lighter moments with aplomb, as his vulnerability cuts through the noise. Nicole Albanese is a revelation, giving Rita a grounded depth, turning a seemingly quiet presence into a figure of startling truth. Together, the ensemble works as one body, each performance amplifying the others, their chemistry generating the very texture the play interrogates.

The second act presses further into the uncanny. June knows their secrets, repeats their voices, unsettles their loyalty to one another. She insists she has always been real, taking on the qualities they once invented. The friends wrestle with whether she is stalker, spirit, projection, or the embodiment of their collective lies. Then comes the line that lingers, delivered plainly, almost gently: “What were you crying about on the bus?” It collapses stage and audience, character and self, and it has stayed with me for days.

At heart, The Goo is as much about June’s ontological status as it is about the slipperiness of friendship, memory, and truth. The characters’ reliance on fabricated stories to cover disappointment reveals a generation fluent in irony but starved for earnestness. Dallimore places that tension under a theatrical microscope, asking whether sincerity can survive in a culture saturated with self-mythology, constant performance and the ubiquitous menace of “cringe”. The production similarly balances intimacy and spectacle with craft. (A tiramisu’s collapse onto Rita’s heirloom blanket lands like betrayal, preparing the ground for June’s uncanny arrival. The goo sequence is grotesque and exuberant, a comic eruption that doubles as collective release, its residue sticky with unease.)

The result begins with the cool and breezy rhythms of a social comedy and mutates into something viscous, unsettling, and almost mythic. Like the strange runoff clouds that haunt its horizon, The Goo hovers absurd and ominous until it breaks open.

-Noah Simon Jampol