The Meeting
Directed by Richard Piatt
312 West 36 Street, Floor 4, Manhattan, NYC
April 1-6, 2026
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| Mitch Lerner as Joe. Photo by Matt Kamimura, courtesy of Theatre Unleashed. |
Since last January, the United States has seen certain words, particularly related to climate science or diversity, effectively banned by the federal government in, for instance, higher education programs, museum displays, and grant applications, including in the arts; the ego-driven renaming and planned shuttering of one of the nation's premiere arts centers; and, this week, governmental threats to jail journalists for doing journalism. So the fascist dystopia in which Brian James Polak's
The Meeting immerses audiences, where all forms of art are prohibited and saying a banned word can trigger omnipresent sensors, feels entirely too recognizable. As discomfiting as it is reaffirming,
The Meeting is part of the 2026
New York City Fringe Festival, an open lottery-based theater festival in which one hundred percent of box office proceeds go directly to the artists, and which this year runs from April 1-19 at UNDER St. Marks, the wild project, Chain Theatre, and The Rat NYC.
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| Veronica Matthews as Joe. Photo by Matt Kamimura, courtesy of Theatre Unleashed. |
The Meeting's immersiveness starts before you enter–everyone is given a name tag with the name Joe on it, and a list of meeting rules is posted on the wall outside (more copies adorn the walls inside)–and continues on the way in as audience members are individually asked if they were followed and requests to turn off smartphones carry more urgency than usual, since they are, as we generally choose to ignore, pocket surveillance devices. Inside, many of the seats are arranged in a semicircle on the floor, further blurring distinctions between cast members, who also wear Joe nametags, and spectators and between the play's reality and our own. To one side is a table with water and a coffee urn, except one of the Joes (Julia Plostnieks) has forgotten to bring the coffee. This Joe, we soon learn despite the verbal circumlocutions required to avoid banned words, was a stage actor before what are referred to as The Changes. Another Joe (
Kristen Bennett) was a playwright, another a director (Veronica Matthews), a third a stage manager (Marcela Barrientos), and a fourth a musician (Mitch Lerner). Despite former-actor Joe's attempt to do some stealth performance, stage-manager Joe, perhaps unsurprisingly given her erstwhile occupation, is determined to follow the meeting agenda, which is brief but broad, ranging from "important issues of the day" to questions of family and memory.
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| Kristen Bennett as Joe. Photo by Matt Kamimura, courtesy of Theatre Unleashed. |
The discussions that take shape around that agenda often give rise to passionate debate among the Joes. The former musician laments that people no longer connect, communicate, or even make eye contact in public, spending most of their time isolated in their "cubes" (sounds familiar), but the former stage manager caution him about Othering those same people through his critique. She similarly takes a more optimistic view when the former playwright asserts that most people are fine with the fascism as long as the government crews are "booting" or "stomping" someone else, arguing that many people care if someone takes the time to explain to them. At another point, the former stage manager's comments on the environment (the Leader has banned anything other than fossil fuels, which also sounds pretty familiar) ignite disagreement over human nature (destructive or just selfish?). The former musician offers probably the biggest contrast to the former stage manager; he is actively disputatious, and even breaks out the phrase "Well, actually" at one point, but he is also not afraid to ask uncomfortable questions like what their meeting is actually accomplishing, a query for which the former director invites him to leave. The Joes express the fatigue of living in resistance to fascism and wonder what will happen after it ends, if it ends. They wrangle over whether art is just selfishness, and question who they are if they can't practice their craft. And they attempt to get at the fundamental question of what connective tissue binds humanity and whether it is something more than fear. In moments of openness, they also share special memories–feelings, smells, tastes, some connected to family and childhood–and hear a letter by one of them to her mother, who has pledged allegiance to the Leader, that makes the case for enduring human connection, the primacy of bonds over difference.
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| Marcela Barrientos as Joe. Photo by Matt Kamimura, courtesy of Theatre Unleashed. |
The Joes do all of this while trying to avoid attracting the authorities and their boots, and the terrific cast wonderfully inhabits the anxiety woven through their creativity and courage such that the audience inhabits it too. At one point during the performance that we attended, a knock turned out to be latecoming playgoer, not the feared authorities, a moment of tension that further eroded distinctions between inside and outside the play, much as when during a couple of the Joes' paranoid pauses, it was hard to tell if the faint sirens were part of the sound design or filtering in from the NYC streets. So by the time the Joes take a bit of a risk in the play's powerful climax, we were reminded even more strongly of the
samizdat publications and clandestine theatrical performances in Communist Czechoslovakia. Former stage manager Joe advocates calling on our own memories while we wait for whatever follows "this disastrous moment in time," to borrow former playwright Joe's words, and
The Meeting is hard to forget.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
More reviews from the 2026 NYC Fringe Festival:
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