Review: In "Breaking the Trust," All That Glitters Is Not Gold Coins

Breaking the Trust

Written by Bill Rogers

Directed by Gerald vanHeerden

Presented by Theater for the New City's Dream Up Festival, Crystal Field, Executive Director, at Theater for the New City

155 First Avenue, Manhattan, NYC

September 2-7, 2025

Jane Seaman, Wynne Anders, Shauna Bloom
It’s a truism that death can bring out the worst in people, but it is no less true that death can bring out the worst about people as well. While Breaking the Trust, a play by Bill Rogers having its NYC premiere as part of the Dream Up Festival 2025 at Theater for the New City, initially seems to be an illustration of the former, by the end of this very funny play, the family has moved beyond their anger over inheritance to anger over and then reconciliation with their pasts.

Siblings Norah (Wynne Anders), the eldest; Martha (Jane Seaman), the wealthiest; and Lorna (Shauna Bloom), the youngest; and their sister Donna (Deborah Unger), who stayed nearer to their childhood home than her sisters, are together for the first time in years for the funeral of their only brother, Ronnie. Also present are Norah’s husband, Perez (Michael Gnat), and their adult son, Byron (Jeff Prewitt), who was close to Ronnie in the past and has recently been released from prison after serving a sentence for his involvement in the theft of a still-missing Picasso painting; significantly if not conspicuously absent are Norah’s husband, used car salesman Del, and Lorna’s husband, Jesse. (If this is confusing, it reflects the reality that families are messy.) When it is revealed that Ronnie left a fortune in untraceable gold in a trust that will benefit only two of his sisters—and sixteen bags of walnut shells and a collection of popsicle sticks to the others—the ensemble cast admirably portray a “normal” family, with all of their history, grudges, and loyalties, responding to an offbeat version of a universal situation. No matter how universal, however, any family gathering is unique thanks to the lives that surround it, and the lives lived in the lead-up to the events of Breaking the Trust are suggested more than explained; interpretive work is left to the audience because families do not litigate their entire history in linear narratives in times of crisis.

As mentioned, this is a very funny play, but this is not to suggest that the characters are funny; Breaking the Trust comments on inherited trauma and the cycles that dishonesty and cruelty engender, and the very fact that these seemingly successful mature adults seem to legitimately need what little they initially expect to inherit upon Ronnie’s death is a commentary on an America where a life spent working and contributing to society is no guarantee of comfortable old age. At points, different pairings of characters have conversations about health, aging, and retirement and what a portion of Ronnie’s presumably ill-gotten gains would mean to them, and that this group of seemingly law-abiding older people spends little time on the source of what they see as a windfall says more about life under capitalism than it does about their personal morals—and as an audience, we don’t care any more than they do; it doesn’t matter where the money came from, but it does matter to us where it will go. The ensemble adeptly captures the tensions between competing interests, and it is the richness of these performances in the build-up to something like a resolution that makes these characters, their family saga, and questions of breaking (the) trust so compelling.

-Leah Richards and John R. Ziegler

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