Maggie Siff, Geneva Carr, Gabrielle Policano, Julie Halston, and Tala Ashe in Breaking the Story. Photo: Joan Marcus

If you have seen Breaking the Story, you will know that I’m making a possibly unforgivable joke when I say Alexis Scheer’s script wants to have its cake and eat it too (as we quite literally see in a midplay sequence that is somewhat incidental to the plot but functions as a capsule version of both what’s provocative about the play and how it hasn’t quite figured out what to be). So while I admit it’s a cheap joke to start off a review with, it also strikes me as a fair assessment. There’s a core human story here–about the choices, risks, and sacrifices that go into making up a meaningful life, and who pays the cost of one person’s choices–and there’s a core debate of ideas, too–about the function and purpose of journalism in the twenty-first century. But Breaking the Story doesn’t really commit to either of them–it spins its wheels stylistically and emotionally, and ultimately comes to an end that shortchanges both. Still, it’s often viscerally effective, thanks to Jo Bonney’s sharp direction and exceptional production elements (especially Darron L. West’s sound design; Elaine J. McCarthy’s projections, which play both on screens that envelop the stage and on surfaces within the playing space for extra explosive punch, and Jeff Croiter’s lighting), which do more of the emotional and structural heavy lifting than they should. There are a few plot points that I’m still not sure I understand, but I felt some of the vicarious trauma in my bones.

Marina Reyes (Maggie Siff) is a war correspondent who’s spent twenty years on the world’s most dangerous frontlines. The events she covers are outlined but not fully specified: there’s a kidnapping, a hotel bombing, and at the opening of the play, an incident where she stays in an evacuated zone on the frontlines and is missing, presumed dead, for an extended period of time. (Among the puzzling plot details: Marina is with her cameraman in this scene, but it’s never clear whether he is likewise missing and presumed dead for this interval. We see plenty of headlines in the projections about a missing journalist.) Having made it home, she claims she’s retiring: she’s bought a giant house in a ritzy Boston suburb, she’s about to receive a major award, one of her mentees is doing a podcast about her career, and she and the cameraman, Bear (Louis Ozawa), who’ve had an on again off again war zone fuckbuddy thing, make a snap decision to get married.

Those around Marina are relieved by her sudden decision to retire, but can’t quite believe it: Her eighteen-year-old daughter, Cruz (Gabrille Policano), an aspiring musician, has grown used to counting on her godmother more than her mother. That godmother, Sonia (Geneva Carr, bringing an effortless confidence that we slowly realize is in fact hard-earned), a dear friend of Marina’s, takes on wedding planning at the drop of a hat, but she’s terrified every time Marina goes out on assignment and channels that fear into haranguing the State Department. Marina’s mother, Gummy (Julie Halston), a bit of a loose cannon on her own (Halston luxuriates in a portrait of an old-school working-class Bostonite that’s perhaps a tiny bit broader than it needs to be), has let Marina build a certain amount of distance between them–both physical and emotional–and isn’t sure how she feels about the prospect of closing that gap. And the podcasting protégée, Nikki (Tala Ashe), sees an opportunity to step into the shoes Marina is vacating–but she has very different ideas about the purpose and function of journalism.

Which is where the play goes a little sideways, trying to simultaneously depict debates both external and internal for Marina: an external debate between Marina and Nikki about nuance, and platforming would-be nazis, and whether the purpose of journalism is to display reality so that an informed audience can make informed decisions, or to choose coverage to steer reality in the right direction. and an internal debate within Marina about the meaning and purpose of her life. But it’s not a fair fight; Ashe’s Nikki feels like a lightweight next to Siff’s steel, and her podcast feels exploitative, especially when we learn that Marina’s ex, thinking her dead, gave Nikki her journals for source material. 

And it never feels particularly likely that Marina’s retirement will stick; it’s clear from minute one that Marina has almost no sense of self outside her profession. Even as we see Siff crumple under the burden of Marina’s PTSD flashbacks, or slip into almost a trance state during the cake tasting, where she’s hallucinating a tasting menu larded with violent memories, we also see her disconnection from the people around her. Marrying Bear may be an attempt to ground herself, but it feels as doomed and capricious as her retirement: this is a man with a five-year-old son on another continent, and a man who himself has no intention of retiring, so how exactly is this going to work? (I confess it’s a tiny bit refreshing to say Bear is a character less fully realized than built of convenient biographical traits; it’s usually the female love interest who fills that slot, but here the women get all the meat.)

Scheer and director Jo Bonney build the play in an uneasy suspension between realism and expressionism: A lot of it takes place more or less realistically in the Wellesley backyard, with McCarthy’s lush, overmagnified projections of nature, Croiter’s richly textured lighting, and West’s delightful suburban soundscape. But this is constantly overwritten and undercut by Marina’s memories and flashbacks–where the sound design shifts to assaultive and the lights to sharp and bleak–and in those memories, her loved ones double as refugees, generals, and other figures from her past. But then there are also scenes where the play skips a beat in time without slipping into the past, moments where Marina gets a “do-over” in a conversation, or a wedding cake tasting. And while the flashbacks hit sonically and visually hard, the do-over moments feel drawn from a different place; the most overt dip into surrealism, during that tasting, feels tonally just bizarre. 

Even so, I was willing to take the ride, for a while. But–mild spoiler alert–the play makes frequent allusions to a secret Marina is hiding, a trauma greater than the ones that have been her bread and butter. That reveal, when it comes, is meant, I think, to be the detail that holds the two impulses together: a question of journalistic ethics at the heart of a life. But the reveal can’t hold up to the weight the play places on it–it feels almost inconsequential compared with the visceral memories we’ve felt alongside Marina, the traumas we’ve heard Bear allude to as if they were nothing. Breaking the Story can’t really recover after the story supposedly at its heart fizzles .