Review: There is a Light and it Never Goes Out: "Connoly" is a Powerful and Intimate Exploration of Family and Mental Health Under Fire

Connoly

Written by Stefan Diethelm

Directed by Delaney “Lanes” May

Presented by Theater for the New City, Executive Director, Crystal Field

155 1st Ave, Manhattan, NYC

November 6–23, 2025

Nikki Neuberger and Abby Messina. Photo by Frank Rodriguez.

Set in an inpatient mental health facility, Connoly tells the story of a teenage girl recovering, or struggling to recover, from a suicide attempt. The world around her is small but charged. Dingo, her older sister, arrives with love that keeps slipping into worry. Natalya, the nurse who manages the ward with firm precision and quiet warmth, becomes an unlikely anchor. And Georgie, a companion who hovers between memory, invention, and apparition, shadows every step Connoly takes. Their collective presence forms a shifting constellation through which Connoly must learn how to move again, one uncertain, halting half choice at a time. Together they build a livable routine, then watch it buckle under the weight of panic, longing, and the impossible math of getting “well enough” to go home.

Small victories appear, a stuffed monkey, a ladybug in a garden, a laugh returning to a face, and then vanish as Connoly clutches for Dingo and tears at fresh bandages while the adults scramble to contain the crisis. The play keeps circling the same aching questions: how do you hold on to someone who wants to disappear, and what does love look like inside a system that cannot promise safety? Connoly becomes a modern tragedy of adolescence, shaped by the wounds families carry, the volatile terrain of mental health, and the fragile promise contained in the simple act of staying alive.

Abby Messina and Emily Kendall. Photo by Frank Rodriguez.

Stefan Diethelm’s writing is fearless. The language moves with raw, disarming clarity, and two moments in particular catch the room off guard. Early on, Connoly admits, “Maybe, maybe if I had just killed myself the first time we wouldn’t be in this situation,” a line delivered without theatrics, almost like a fact rehearsed internally for months. It crystallizes the play’s refusal to romanticize survival; staying alive is not presented as triumph, but as a destabilizing return to a world that has no idea what to do with her. Later, in a quieter register, she confides to Georgie, “To be honest, I always thought I had made you up, somehow? That you only existed in my head to keep me company.” The line opens another door, where loneliness and imagination blur, and the need for companionship becomes a kind of self-soothing storytelling. Together, these moments define the play’s emotional architecture, revealing a mind working to anchor itself in a reality that keeps slipping sideways.

Four remarkable performances ground the production in authenticity and empathy. Nikki Neuberger’s Connoly is a portrait of human vibrance and vulnerability. She embodies the paradox at the heart of recovery, the simultaneous desire and inability to heal oneself. Abby Messina’s Dingo, the older sister, in over her head, carries equal parts fierce devotion and total exhaustion. Her performance walks a delicate line between confidence and fragility - the young caretaker who also needs care. Alessia Seclì’s Natalya radiates authority tempered by compassion, weary from repetition yet unyielding in purpose. And Emily Kendall Cohen (as Georgie) is an understated force, an otherworldly presence who commands the room even in silence, observing Connoly’s unraveling from across the stage (and perhaps across time).

Nikki Neuberger and Abby Messina. Photo by Frank Rodriguez.

Here verisimilitude becomes an ethical asset, and Connoly spends it wisely. The set is minimal, a bed and bedside table, exactly as spaces in such wards often are. Costumes speak in quiet detail, most notably the non-slip socks that give inpatient units their darkly playful nickname among those who know: “grippy sock jail.” (There are crayons, yes; colored pencils, depending on behavior, no.) Each of these design choices reinforces the production’s realism without spectacle, its empathy without sentimentality.

Connoly blends realism with something harder to name, the inchoate texture of a mind negotiating its own survival. It never fetishizes illness, never romanticizes despair. It looks directly at what it means to persist when the light dims, and in doing so becomes a rare kind of testament: unflinching, compassionate, and necessary.

-Noah Simon Jampol