Review: Make It Your Plan A to See "Plan C"

Plan C

Devised and written by the ensemble of Hook & Eye Theater

Conceived and directed by Carrie Heitman

Presented by Hook & Eye Theater and The Tank at The Tank

312 W 36 St, Manhattan, NYC

March 12-April 12, 2026

The cast of Plan C. Photo by Valerie Terranova.

In The Invention of News (Yale University Press, 2014), Andrew Pettegree notes, "Women ... played an active role in the print industry virtually since its beginning, almost certainly a more active role than in any other craft industry," and he supplies as one example of this activity "the achievement of the redoubtable" Alexandrine von Taxis, a German countess who "effectively ran the Taxis postal network for eighteen years after her husband's death, and steered the company through the notably turbulent decades of the latter part of the Thirty Years War" that devastated seventeenth-century Europe (pp. 281, 218, 282). Plan C, the new play from Hook & Eye Theater Company, takes the audience beyond the public-facing element of von Taxis's business, focusing on her trade in the news, gossip, and secrets that passed through her network during a period of politico-religious conflict. Meanwhile, a few centuries later, in another area roiled by politico-religious conflict, present-day Appalachia, another woman-owned business serves as the site of another clandestine activity operating through its mail service. Plan C unites these parallel narratives in an evocative, engrossing, and ultimately heartening articulation of the risks, ethics, and impacts of (women) choosing resistance in the face of oppression.

Letters passing through the secret "black chamber" of Alexandrine von Taxis's (Elizabeth London) post office are unsealed, mined for useful information, and resealed before being delivered to their intended recipients. Alexandrine's staff is cosmopolitan but mostly women: Henriette (Parnia Ayari), Maria (Vann Dukes), Margaret (Meghan Grover), and Matilde (Nylda Mark) work alongside the chamber's lone male presence, Keiren (Jesse B. Koehler). Some of them, such as the Irish Keiren and English Margaret, are there just for the fun in ferreting out entertaining gossip, but the changing political situation is inescapably seeping into both the letters and into everyone's lives. The chamber's new recruit, Deborah (Rina Dutta), is wife to Balthazar (Daniel Olguin), who stands to benefit from the war being waged by the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II (Cynthia Babak), a staunch Catholic not afraid of a massacre here and there to advance his goals. Alexandrine herself has been using the black chamber as a way to search for news of her daughter, but as the war comes closer to home, everyone there will be forced to decide what, if anything, they are willing to risk for what they believe is right.

The cast of Plan C. Photo by Valerie Terranova.

Interleaved with this early modern narrative is a contemporary counterpart. The set, designed by Anna Grigo and criss-crossed above by red cords suggesting lines of interconnection, transforms efficiently back and forth between Alexandrine's black chamber and a hardware store owned by widow Clara (Nylda Mark), which has just suffered a break-in (a few other locations, such as a room in Balthazar and Deborah's home, are briefly represented as well). In addition to employee and family friend Birdie (Cythia Babak), Clara's college-aged daughter Charley (Vann Dukes) helps out in the store, the women's health clinic at which she worked having been forced to close. Patrick (Jesse B. Koehler), a childhood friend of Clara's and now a police officer, often stops by. Here too, there are some deeper currents running below the surface. For instance, Patrick's wife, Avery (Meghan Grover), has recently had a miscarriage, and it becomes apparent that the pair have different ideas about trying for another pregnancy, while Charley is meeting in secret with a physician from her job at the now-shuttered clinic, Dr. Bee (Parnia Ayari). The time and place are far removed from Alexandrine's black chamber, but the types of choices that these characters will have to make are as close as a letter and its envelope.

Those similarities extend to questions of men with power imposing their will on others, including men with power deciding for a woman what happens to her body–restrictions on reproductive health and burning at the stake are, for example, both violations of bodily autonomy, however far apart they fall on that spectrum. Both narratives center resistance to such impositions in women-run spaces and networks, networks extending in the seventeenth-century strand as far as the Protestant "Winter Queen" Elizabeth Stuart (Meghan Grover). Smaller links between past and present appear in details like Birdie stocking a seventeenth-century letter opener among the antiques in Clara's store, the fact that she (a Catholic) once threw a Winter Queen commemorative plate at her husband, the mixture of costuming from both periods in a final scene that at reprises a portion of the opening, and even the incorporation of missives that audience members are invited to leave in a basket on the stage prior to the beginning of the performance. Periodic punctuation is provided by expressive segments of stylized movement (choreographed by Leslie Galán Guyton), and the production makes impactful use of music in these segments and elsewhere, including with contrasting appearances of a Tanner Adell track. Whether in the tension generated between Dutta's Deborah and Olguin's Balthazar, who loves but is suspicious of his wife, the comedy of Babak's Birdie offering Patrick advice she gleaned from CSI, the courage and conviction displayed by Ayari's Henriette and Dr. Bee, or the way that Mark's Clara waits until she's alone to briefly break down, the terrific cast inhabits their characters so well that it can be easy to forget at points that characters from different time periods are played by the same actor. One of those characters asserts that small acts of bravery can (help) derail tyranny, and Plan C not only provides some powerful examples but also prompts us to ask what else such acts might look like.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards