Arielle Goldman, Janet Zarish, Quentin Chisholm, Ari Derambakhsh in The Bookstore. Photo: Hunter Canning

People are always telling me how lucky I am to work in a bookstore. Customers, fueled by a recent surge of bookstore-based books and movies, sigh with jealousy when they walk into the shop and find shelves that stretch to the ceiling. They love to imagine a dreamlike version of bookselling life—cozy, warm, and full of possibilities. For them, the aesthetic is enough. 

The Bookstore, written by Michael Walek and transferred this winter to 59E59 from NJ Rep, devotes most of its energy to capturing this atmosphere. The entire play takes place at an unnamed bookstore in the West Village, full of dark-wood tables and maroon-cushioned armchairs. When the store’s owner, a maternal gray-haired woman named Carey (Janet Zarish), unlocks the doors in the morning, she immediately starts the kettle for a cup of tea. She and her two employees banter with literary facts and references, gossiping about Edith Wharton’s nickname or Virginia Woolf’s family. It’s ripped right from every reader’s dream. The problem with pure aesthetics, however, is that they’re only pretty to look at once or twice. Beyond the first five minutes, it becomes clear that a good play is made up of far more than just coziness: With nothing else to hold it up, The Bookstore falls paper flat. 

It’s funny how, for a show about independent bookselling, so little is actually about a store. Walek and director William Carden prioritize an idealized bookish imaginary over the actual experience of fighting against online giants and corporate retailers, despite what’s signaled by the program. “We live in a time when independent bookstores are under threat and books are viewed as archeological artifacts,” writes executive producer Gabor Barabas, even though the play never once discusses how business is going. The production’s partnership with independent bookstores Argosy and McNally Jackson–although it’s not clear, in practice, what that means–seems to have been an attempt to make their bookstore into something beyond Jessica Parks’s pretty set. Such desires are not reflected in the script. 

Instead, we follow Carey and her two employees through a relatively routine year in their lives. There are never any real stakes in The Bookstore; it’s hard to be invested when things are largely the same in September as they were in February. What little plot there is takes place in short, unsubtle bits of dialogue forced in between book talk. At the end of the first scene, Walek inserts the first of several jarring fourth-wall breaks so Carey can tell us she’s dying of cancer. “I am a ghost, but I don’t know it yet,” she deadpans. “By Christmas I will be dead.” This is the play’s only semblance of tension, but even this isn’t enough to stir any sort of feeling in the audience—there’s nothing we can do about it, and we don’t yet care enough about Carey. Instead, it creates a strange, alienating experience, where a burst of startling omniscience is supposed to hold our interest over twelve uneventful months. 

Walek needs us, then, to buy into the characters: The play’s success rests on us being content watching them do very little for two hours and ten minutes. This would be easier if they seemed to have any internal life. Mediocre performances by cool employee/writer Brittany (Ari Derambakhsh) and Spencer (Quentin Chisholm), a young gay actor who finds refuge in the store, seem to be fueled primarily by the drawbacks of the text, which forces them to deliver their personalities in rote direct address. Carey tells us in a single throwaway line that she left home after a fight with her mother, clearly meant to get us to her one defining trauma: that she had friends who died of AIDS. To care about her, the audience needs to know more. Did she ever see her mother again? Why didn’t she marry or have children? If she’s lonely, as she says directly in one fleeting moment, why doesn’t she ever act like it? We never learn how she feels about the fact that she’s dying without anyone to take her to doctors’ appointments, but we do know she once had a threesome with Harold Pinter. 

Lines like these, whether they be anecdotes or emotions, are written in factually exact and awkward ways: “I was mean to you because I was afraid to tell you I was dying,” Carey tells Spencer. The show’s format–one scene for every month–means that potential conflicts, like this fight, never get developed beyond a few passing “it’s been a long time”s. Pretentious aspiring writer Abby (Arielle Goldman) is the best developed, with a clear internal conflict. She’s terrified that others will find out she hasn’t read the books she thinks she should have. When she lies about The Age of Innocence, it’s the only moment of the show that implies a character may be saying something different than they’re feeling. 

This is Walek’s first play. It seems clear what he was thinking: a cozy bookstore, a heartwarming story, a year in the life of this chosen family as a chapter comes to the end. The concept of it, while not exactly ground-breaking, seems pleasant enough. By the time December comes, however, we’re still waiting for The Bookstore to be anything more than its name initially implied. Perhaps some plays are better on paper.