Review: Lessons in Truth and Consequences in “The Totality of All Things”

The Totality of All Things

Written by Erik Gernand

Directed by Shannon Patterson

Presented by UP Theatre Company at Theater 154

154 Christopher St, Manhattan, NYC

May 7-17, 2026

Joseph Dean Anderson, DeAnna Lenhart, Colleen Clinton, and Logan Floyd. Photo by Mikiodo.

At the start of UP Theater Company’s production of Erik Gernand’s The Totality of All Things, directed by Shannon Patterson, the word “TRUTH” waits on a classroom board before the play has begun in earnest. The lights are already up as the audience enters, giving us time to inhabit this journalism classroom: buzzing fluorescents overhead, chrome-and-plastic chairs, awards crowding the walls behind the teacher’s desk, institutional paint fading at the edges. The room feels immediately recognizable and intensely specific, every classroom and this classroom at once, a wholly transformed 154 Christopher Street Theatre space.

That specificity matters. Gernand’s play, set in Lewiston, Indiana in the fall of 2015, begins with Judith (Colleen Clinton), a veteran journalism teacher, instructing her students that truth is not opinion, feeling, conspiracy, or belief, but something to be proved and confirmed again and again. Before long, however, a bulletin board celebrating marriage equality is vandalized with a swastika, and the classroom becomes not only the site of an investigation, but a testing ground for how facts move through institutions, friendships, and fear.

Colleen Clinton and DeAnna Lenhart. Photo by Mikiodo. 

Patterson’s production understands that this is not an abstract issue play, but a drama of place. The classroom carries the stale durability of public education and the accumulated care of someone who has made a workspace into moral territory. When the vandalized bulletin board is covered by a sheet, the image becomes startlingly funereal, like a body laid out for mourning. Scrawled across the covering are the words “HATE CRIME BAND-AID,” turning concealment itself into accusation.

The realism never settles into stasis. With minimal shifts, the room expands outward into football bleachers, a local bar, and the surrounding world of Lewiston. Risers at the front of the stage become an especially effective recurring image, first capturing the communal warmth of teachers watching football with spiked cocoa in hand, and later returning after relationships and certainties have fractured. Lighting quietly reshapes the space throughout, while the classroom door, frequently left distractingly ajar, becomes one of the evening’s most unsettling motifs. Safety here is always partial; privacy temporary.

Colleen Clinton and Rik Walter. Photo by Mikiodo. 

One of the production’s greatest strengths is its refusal to flatten Lewiston into caricature. Gernand’s script is deeply political, but Patterson roots it in workplace rhythms, faculty friendships, football rituals, soda brand loyalties, and the exhausted humor of public-school teachers trying to survive another week. The play is often very funny – and that humor matters because it makes the fractures that follow feel painfully human rather than schematic or vague.

The ensemble handles those tonal shifts exceptionally well. Cody Jenison gives the evening’s standout performance as Micah, the student reporter drawn into the center of the unfolding crisis. Physically precise, often rocking nervously in his sneakers, Jenison captures both adolescent uncertainty and growing moral clarity. His interstitial monologues, written in the heightened language of a young writer discovering both his gifts and the danger of using them, become the production’s emotional spine. Micah is not simply observing events; he is learning what it means to turn observation into testimony.

Cody Jenison and Logan Floyd. Photo by Mikiodo.

As Judith, Clinton delivers a formidable naturalistic performance. Perfectly costumed in corduroy with just the right academic severity, Clinton inhabits the character’s intelligence, wit, and mounting obsession fully. Her Judith is deeply committed to principle, but the production never allows that commitment to remain uncomplicated. By the time she reaches her final emotional rupture, the moment lands not as sudden collapse, but as the inevitable consequence of mistaking moral certainty for inexhaustibility.

DeAnna Lenhart’s DeeAnn supplies the production with much of its painful complexity. Warm, funny, loyal, and increasingly difficult to reconcile politically, DeeAnn embodies one of the play’s hardest questions: how can kindness and prejudice coexist within the same person, the same friendship, the same community? Lenhart wisely refuses to simplify her, and the unraveling of DeeAnn and Judith’s friendship becomes one of the production’s deepest wounds.

Logan Floyd, Colleen Clinton, DeAnna Lenhart, and Rik Walter. Photo by Mikiodo.

Logan Floyd brings kinetic comic energy to Ms. Carter, the anxious student teacher gradually discovering a moral compass beneath her awkwardness, while Joseph Dean Anderson gives Gregg an affecting Midwestern sweetness that makes the character’s blind spots all the more troubling. Their extended Coke-versus-Pepsi scene, which gradually drifts toward discussion of a previous school scandal, becomes one of the production’s finest sequences, a reminder of how quickly ordinary conversation can expose deeper civic fractures. Rik Walter gives Principal Benson a weary gravitas that complicates the role beyond bureaucratic obstruction. His Benson understands precisely how institutions survive: by softening language, slowing conflict, and hoping crises pass before the ground gives way.

What makes The Totality of All Things so effective is that it resists easy moral sorting. The play is deeply concerned with truth, but equally concerned with the people who believe they already possess it. Gernand’s script, and Patterson’s production, understand that civic collapse rarely arrives all at once; it accumulates gradually through exhaustion, fear, loyalty, misinformation, and the small compromises people make in order to continue living beside one another.

By the end of the evening, the classroom no longer feels like a stable site of learning, but a fragile democratic space struggling to contain forces far larger than itself. The fluorescent lights still buzz overhead. The door remains slightly open. “TRUTH” still hangs on the board with unwavering confidence. But Patterson’s production leaves us far less certain that truth alone can hold a community together once fear and grievance begin humming louder than the lights above it.

-Noah Simon Jampol