Review: Everyone is Beside Themselves in the Surreal Sci-Fi of "Replaced!"

Replaced!

Written and directed by Jess Lauricello

Presented by The Brick in association with Laurizzary at Brick Aux

628 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NYC

December 10-13, 2025

Nearly everyone, at some point, feels the absolute difference of the Other–perhaps because we can only ever know a fraction of another's self, perhaps because someone's worldview diverges so radically from our own that it seems impossible to comprehend. But whatever the reason, other people can sometimes seem like aliens, especially when so many of them spend so much of their time in the closed-off thrall of one screen or another. Sometimes, one may even feel like an unknowable stranger to oneself. A new production of Replaced!, the first play that Laurizzary Co-Artistic Director Jess Lauricello ever wrote, literalizes–albeit, to an extent, ambiguously–such feelings with an invigoratingly surreal body-snatching narrative that centers one young woman's fraught relationships with herself, her media-saturated family, her would-be romantic partner, and even reality itself.

The play's action begins with a scene of violence and melodrama between a woman and a man (Annabella Pritchard and Jack Pappas) whose exchange comedically introduces the idea of unbridgeable difference between two people. The pair turn out to be characters on a tv show being watched by the protagonist's father, Harold (Luis Feliciano). Said protagonist (Zoe Mintz), whose lack of a name might gesture as much to her questioning of who she is as it does to an everywoman status, observes later that her father, who spends much of his onstage time on a couch with a tv remote in his hand, has become increasingly violent. And the later substitution of a gun for the remote, as well as the outside influence suggested by the way Harold sometimes moves hint at a link between this change and Harold's favorite screen. While Harold watches tv, his wife, Angie (Kristen Hoffman), watches her smartphone, ensconced in over-ear headphones, and their son, Richard (Padraig Bond), keeps his attention trained on his Nintendo Switch. This dynamic gives rise to some very funny background business as, across the performance area, their daughter has an earnest conversation with Paul (Pedro Vierre), who has applied to a writing collective in Paris, about love, marriage, and death. The next time that she sees Paul, however, more than just his newly polished look leads her to question whether he really is Paul; and his response causes her to extend that question to everyone around her. Have they all been replaced? Is she, as maybe-not-Paul-anymore accuses, herself a sort of empty shell wearing a face?

Paul(?), as he is listed in the program, is all about pledging to give people what they want and asks whether it matters if experience isn't real as long as it's better. One trade-off, though, appears to be that people can't agree on basic reality, as seen during an absurdist disagreement among those assembled for Harold's birthday in a scene that builds to glorious chaos and includes Harold and Angie having a cascade of what could be headlines or social media comments shouted into their ears. Paul links love to a state of constant change, but while he may have a point and whatever benefits he promises from replacement, not all personal change is for the better–many types of screen-driven radicalization certainly aren't. And Paul's blaming the changes that the daughter sees in other people on her pushing them away rather than on other, outside influences echoes the sort of denialism doubtless replicated in many households across the nation.

The idea that people are being replaced brings to mind conspiracy theories about lizard people, but acting itself is another variety of self-replacement, and while the daughter and Paul(?) argue, they play pretend and then play at being actors, including reciting part of the nunnery scene from Hamlet–a surprise swerve which both aligns really well with the show's thematic concerns and gives a new cast to the seemingly changed Hamlet's assertion that Ophelia's father should be confined to playing the fool in his own home when we have Harold in mind. At times, the boundaries between fiction, simulation, and reality lose their cohesion, helped, for example, by the actors not in a scene frequently joining an audience seated on three sides of the performance area or, less subtly, by moments like a sudden offstage outbreak of applause for the family, as if they were in a sitcom. Feliciano, Hoffman, Pritchard, and Pappas are all very funny as the daughter's parents and their friends, with Felicano and Hoffman using their physicality to give an underlayer of creepiness to Harold and Angie. Zach Wegner lends an even more unsettling edge to Father McCarthy, who strikes one as uncanny from the first; and Bond makes for a great angry younger brother (he also gets one hilarious conspiratorial speech that also works as in-joke for anyone familiar with his work as playwright of The Climate Fables). Vierre brings an impactful volatility to Paul(?), trading calm persuasion for bursts of wild-eyed anger or the impression that control over the body he is in is breaking down, and at the center of it all is Mintz's daughter, an injured, playful, self-aware, anxious, wondering presence. When Paul(?) asks her character if she wants to go back to an earlier point when things were still just funny, it just underscores how we as a nation don't have that option; but at least we have shows like Replaced! as some consolation.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards