Review: Life is But a Belle Reve in "Everything is Here"

Everything is Here

Written by Peggy Stafford

Directed by Meghan Finn

Choreography by Lisa Fagan

Presented by The Tank in collaboration with New Georges at 59E59

59 E 59 St., Manhattan, NYC

December 3-20, 2025

L to R: Petronia Paley, Jan Leslie Harding, Mia Katigbak. Photo by Mari Eimas-Dietrich. 

Early in Everything is Here, from Brooklyn-based playwright, screenwriter, and educator Peggy Stafford, one woman says to another of the latter's potential age-gap romance that age is just a number. The fact that the speaker here is a resident in an assisted-living facility talking with her nurse, though, raises the question of the limits of this maxim. Focused on a trio of the facility's residents, alongside a couple of its staff, Everything is Here contemplates the realities of aging, including through its own characters rehearsing scenes from A Streetcar Named Desire, with laugh-out-loud humor, a well-earned pathos tinged with melancholy, and a few fitting dashes of absurdity.

L to R: Jan Leslie Harding, Pete Simpson, Petronia Paley, Mia Katigbak. Photo by Mari Eimas-Dietrich.

The trio of women at the play's center are Bev (Jan Leslie Harding), the most unfiltered of the three; Janice (Mia Katigbak), whose concern for rules turns out to be more than a little ironic and who has trouble relaxing; and Bonnie (Petronia Paley), a former flight attendant and the glue that holds these three friends together. The frequency with which the women are attended to by nurse Nikki (Susannah Millonzi) stems from her repeatedly picking up extra shifts, which implies that the freedom of flight and unencumbered movement represented in her tattoos are lacking for her charges only in a different degree than for her. Actor Grant (Pete Simpson), meanwhile, works at the facility running activity periods for the residents while going out for auditions and living with his mother and her quintet of cats (temporarily, he stresses).In fact, the production opens with Grant leading Bev, Janice, and Bonnie through a guided visualization exercise–the lightless theater neatly replicating for the audience the eyes-closed experience of the women–involving a path through ancient forest and the question of what they feel that they have lost on that path. Later, when Grant is practicing for an audition to play Mitch in Streetcar, he enlists the women as scene partners, eventually transforming the activity period into a species of theater workshop (pointedly, the scenes we see them read from feature Blanche but not Stanley, and Blanche's line, spoken by Bonnie, "I've got to keep a hold of myself" resonates well beyond its source text ). When they are not acting out scenes from Tennessee Williams, the women pass the time with cards, conversation, and keeping an eye on a large, sagging tree limb outside which they worry will collapse. Within this circumscribed existence, they endure not only the usual feelings of loneliness and physical problems attendant on aging but also individual aging-related problems such as Bev's exhaustion of her savings.

L to R: Susannah Millonzi and Petronia Paley. Photo by Mari Eimas-Dietrich.

One place where these characters can escape circumscription, of course, is within their own minds, and they discuss the pleasure of being within the bubble of one's own thoughts during a scene in which Nikki gives Janice a scalp massage to try to relax her for a routine test. Both theater and memory might be seen as part of such a bubble; and each character, except for the youngest, Nikki, delivers a short monologue to the audience about something in their past, which enriches their characters while calling attention to the ways in which they are simultaneously beyond and still bound by those past experiences. The show also makes periodic use of choreographed segments, and one of these, which finds Bev, Bonnie, and Janice enacting a looping set of movements to a metronymic soundscape, recurs several times. The repetition of and within this segment speaks to the women's experience, and when, in later repetitions, someone has to pause or two of the women get out of sync, these deviations take on their own significant symbolism.

Mia Katigbak. Photo by Mari Eimas-Dietrich.

The set, designed by Richard Hoover, perfectly captures the peculiar blend of domestic and medical typical of assisted living facilities, and its realism–it includes a working fish tank on one wall–is given a taste of uncanniness by the very large garden gnome planted just outside one of its floor-to-ceiling windows. The accomplished cast are both very funny–Simpson's theatrical miming as Grant and Paley's delivery of Bonnie's disquisition on the decline in airline food come to mind–and moving, the regrets and disappointments of their layered characters if anything highlighting their perseverance, as when Harding's Bev rather unconvincingly tries to downplay the implications of her need to cut costs, Katigbak's Janice offhandedly reveals a traumatic experience from her married life, or Millonzi's Nikki describes the comfort she draws from imagining that a stranger on the street might be her long-dead mother. Grant (the only male character) doesn't accept aging in the same way as Bev, Bonnie, and Janice, but the show's ending underscores that Grant, like all of us, cannot step off that particular path, one stop on which is represented through a remarkable, unexpected, and powerfully symbolic moment of absurdism involving Bev near the production's conclusion. For a delightful and affecting evening of theater, Everything is Here indeed.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards