Quincy Tyler Bernstine and Michael Chernus in Well, I’ll Let You Go. Photo: Emilio Madrid

The structure of Well, I’ll Let You Go owes a bit to a classic mystery novel: like a detective interviewing suspects, Maggie (Quincy Tyler Bernstine) tries with every conversation to unearth the truth about the recent, sudden, and violent death of her husband, Marv. Proceeding from one two-person scene to the next, Bubba Weiler’s script may not technically comprise a sequence of interrogations, but it often feels that way. There’s an urgency, even a sense of threat to each of the conversations: Marv’s slightly-too-dependent cousin Wally (Will Dagger) is tipping into paranoia and making noise about quitting his job. The funeral director Joanie (Constance Shulman) has been sent by Marv’s brother to badger Maggie into making choices about arrangements. That brother, Jeff (Danny McCarthy), a local cop, is pushing her to plan the funeral so they can all move on; his wife (and Maggie’s best friend), Julie (Amelia Workman), comes with surprising information about Marv’s whereabouts on the day of his death, wondering if Maggie already knows it. Also a bit like a mystery novel, the plot as it unfolds hinges on some not-entirely-plausible twists and conjunctions. 

But the plot isn’t really the point here; the central mystery is in Maggie’s own mind: the manner and location of Marv’s death have led her to believe she didn’t really know him at all, and she doesn’t know how to grieve–let alone plan a funeral–for a man she doesn’t know. All the accoutrements of death–the proliferation of flowers and casseroles; her unwillingness to unwrap Marv’s best suit from its dry-cleaning plastic–do nothing more than obfuscate that central question: was the heart of their marriage sound, or has her whole life been a lie?

The daisy-chain construction allows for a keen series of character portraits in intense snapshots, a series of treats with an ensemble as deep as this one. The scenes take a similar pattern, and in each Weiler and his actors build the unique rhythm of a character’s speech. Director Jack Serio generally excels in his work with actors, and this is no exception. The pairs can sometimes get a little physically marooned in the large Irondale space, but the emotional connections never flag. The bedrock is Bernstine’s Maggie, whose inherent flinty competence never wavers even as her doubts grow, but she’s ably matched by all, in different ways: Shulman brings rueful humor to Josie’s doggedness. Workman’s Julie has the tentativeness of someone who’s never needed to take charge of a situation before. Emily Davis plays Angela, a mysterious woman who keeps insisting she needs to talk to Maggie face to face in the immediate wake of Marv’s death, as one raw nerve. Danny McCarthy subtly shades Jeff with the bafflement of a bully who’s so comfortable in his authority that he doesn’t quite know how to handle being disagreed with. 

But the downside, narratively, is that story beats get jettisoned as we go; Maggie’s investigation fuels the forward momentum, as we learn new facts and fill in gaps in the action with each conversation. But we never return to characters after we’ve left them, which means the early pairs (Wally and Julie) fade from memory, and key emotional moments toward the end of the play rest in the hands of characters we’ve only just met: Angela and later her daughter, Ashley (Cricket Brown). 

Another thing that Well, I’ll Let You Go owes a great deal to is Our Town. The counterpoint to these intense two-hander scenes is a more expansive narrative voice, one that sounds a lot like Our Town’s Stage Manager, painting the picture of the community and even the home in which we find ourselves. The actual stage space, designed by Frank J. Oliva and lit by Stacey Derosier, is little more than a sketch: folding chairs and tables; a mini-fridge; house lighting through much of the play. As Maggie feels her life de-materializing in her grief and uncertainty, we feel only lightly grounded in the physical environment. (Props throughout–balloons, an overabundance of flowers and casserole dishes, even a wheelbarrow-full of garden mulch–gradually fill in realistic detail. Avery Read’s costumes also help with character notes.) 

But through the narrator’s eyes, we see all the context. Michael Chernus’s unadorned, compassionate tone fills in the backstory, but also clues us in to the emotional wounds and secrets and shames of the people we see before us; shows us the core of unfulfilled expectations and loss that underlies every interaction, and the gradual curdling of Maggie’s grief into something darker. It would be scathing if it weren’t so gentle, and the tension that Weiler and Serio create between the leisurely, discursive, sneakily incisive narrative voice and the spikier, more fraught, and propulsive interactions between the characters is the energy that drives the play. 

We’re in a small Midwestern town hollowed out by the loss of manufacturing, not the picturesque New England of Grover’s Corner, but the framing device works much the same way as Our Town’s, lulling us into thinking we understand its spareness of style and then turning it into something darker. (Reminiscent of the much-lauded 2009 off-Broadway production, this allows the restraint of its production to shift near the end, when Maggie finally gets the answers she’s seeking and re-grounds herself in her life.)

The title implies the end of a conversation: what you say when getting off the phone. But it also feels, here, like a pragmatic sigh of grief, of resignation. Well, I’ll Let You Go is, ultimately, a play about loss: not just the loss of a husband, but the slow deflation of one’s dreams and one’s community. Everyone here works for an Amazon distribution center now. All the characters are weighed down by their disappointments: Maggie mourning the life she thinks she’d have led if she hadn’t met Marv when Julie started dating his brother. Julie’s marriage to an asshole. Wally’s wounded dignity when Maggie won’t support his (objectively terrible, but his own) plans. Ashley’s destructive romantic choices that threaten to derail her education. (None of the men in this play, including the heroic Marv, comes off particularly well.) Even Joanie, the comic foil, has set her life course in reaction to the death of a child. Weiler and Serio movingly paint a place where the best you can hope for is “bearable.” The plot may take some implausible turns, and the structure may not always serve, but the underlying emotional core hits, and hits hard–with Chernus’s performance (including a late-in-the-play revelation that I won’t spoil) grounding the whole.