Review: "Syringe" Asks What You Would Do to Survive…and Go Viral on Substack

Syringe

Written and directed by Francis Bogan

Assistant Directors: Lauren Presley and Gabby Laurendine

Producer: Eliza Spinna

Presented at Chain Theatre

312 W. 36th St., 4th fl., Manhattan, NYC

July 11-30, 2026

Art by Ryan Prehara. IG: @seminalspider 

While most horror media ends with the survival–or not–of its protagonist(s), some, such as parts of the Scream franchise or Grady Hendrix's 2021 novel The Final Girl Support Group, considers what happens after that moment of survival. The one-act Syringe, from Brooklyn-based playwright Francis Bogan, joins this less typical strand of horror narrative with its darkly comic look at a group of friends who undergo a Saw-style ordeal. Deftly satirizing our era of true-crime proliferation and internet-driven self-commodification while asking what friendship should look like, Syringe is currently making its premiere at Chain Theatre's Summer One-Act Festival, running from July 9th through August 1st. Syringe is part of Block 18 in the festival schedule, which also includes Jack Wohl's Rewind, Play, in which a woman (Emily Glaser) discovers a video featuring an unknown man (Justin Andrew Davis) that tests the trust in her relationship with her husband (Samuel Keran); and 3600, written by Molly McQuillan and directed by AMT/Anna Marie Tobin, which finds a young woman (a terrific Ashley M. Cowles) sealed with a cult leader (Casey Mars Miller) in a room where they will both die when the clock that counts down in real time reaches zero.

Syringe opens with a trio of friends–Miles (Derek Johnson), Chris (Amarih SoVann), and newcomer Nick (Dylan Lesch)–sitting around a campfire, playing one of those rules-heavy strategy card games (a fourth person, Scottie, is offstage, reported to be feeling unwell). The game introduces the theme of ethical choice that will extend through the play as one of the men chooses between the Peace Envoy and Murder cards in a bid to win. Soon, though, the trio must engage in a contest with much higher stakes when they succumb to having been drugged and wake up in chains, at which point a mysterious voice (Francis Bogan) forces them to play a Saw-inspired game involving a syringe of poison. Unlike Saw, Syringe still has a lot of ground to cover after its kidnapping ordeal concludes, from a talk show interview to a support group segment with one of the funniest lines we've heard in a while to a pivotal graveyard encounter, all arcing back towards another evening around another campfire.

Before the kidnapping, we learn that Chris has in the past helped out Miles, who's struggling to make it, but draws the line at trying to get him a job at his financial firm. Miles wants to be a writer but may not be very good at writing–although, the play jokes, this may not matter in a time when most writing has become "content." Part of this ceaseless churn of content, as Syringe underlines, sells trauma: here, even the priest (Dylan Lesch) officiating a solemn event is plugged into the Substack ecosystem and hoping something saleable will happen to him. Much critique of the true crime industry focuses on the exploitation of victims and survivors by creators and fans, but Syringe is atypical in giving us a survivor who arguably exploits himself–and his friends. In contrast to such attempts to profit, one exchange in the play suggests, friendship should be neither transactional nor based on "success." In the game of life, too, one can choose the peace card or the murder card (usually in a metaphorical sense). And the play's rendering of the stresses of the endless self-promotion necessary to attempt to keep oneself relevant as a commodity resonates well beyond the true crime genre. Johnson and SoVann invest the dynamic between Miles and Chris with all the unspoken feeling and occasional awkwardness of longtime friendship; and Johnson never lets Miles cross the line from sympathetic to pathetic, much as SoVann, who also plays a few other small roles, keeps the empathy visible in Chris's boundary setting with Miles. Lesch is fantastic not only as Nick, the kind of guy who absolutely will break out the rule book during your gaming session, but also in creating a series of distinct characters with brief appearances–his priest is very funny, but we would unquestionably watch a spinoff starring Pat Terry, the talk show host whom Lesch plays with a hilarious, outsized Graham Norton-adjacent vibe. In the end, the real horror of Syringe would be missing it.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards