Review: Lowcountry Is a Masterpiece of Millennial Rage

Audiences at Broadway’s Booth Theatre, where Kimberly Belflower’s John Proctor Is the Villain is playing through the summer, respond to the MeToo drama with a mixture of laughter, applause, and (according to the paper of record) tears. But that’s to be expected when the plot hews so closely to the conventional villain-victim narrative in 2025.

Far more difficult is what Abby Rosebrock is attempting with Lowcountry, which is now making its astonishing world premiere at Atlantic Theater Company. It boldly tests the American theater’s much-advertised capacity for empathy while muddying our cherished moral clarity.

Rosebrock selects as her protagonist the least of these, in the imagination of the average American anyway. David (Babak Tafti) is a middle-aged dad—divorced, working as a cook at Waffle House, and living in a sad studio apartment in Moncks Corner, South Carolina. He’s also a registered sex offender.

The play opens with a phone call between David and his sponsor from his court-mandated sex-addiction program. Sixtysomething Paul (Keith Kupferer) once had a serious problem with prostitutes, but he has since mellowed and prospered. He has made it his “mission and penance” to guide “deadbeats” like David out of sex addiction. If David listens and obeys, Paul tells him, his lawyer buddy will get him joint custody, and he can finally return to pursuing the American dream.

“Maybe not home ownership,” Paul tempers David’s expectations, “if guys like me keep buyin’ BlackRock … I don’t envy y’all’s generation,” he says with a chuckle, communicating that he knows his behavior is making life worse for his fellow Americans, but he won’t stop. David listens patiently over the line to the sound of Paul’s grandchildren splashing in his pool as he attempts to repair the cheap curtain that separates his sitting area from the bed. He absolutely cannot be reminded of the bed—not with a date coming over.

Dating (sans sex, which is reserved for marriage) is part of the program, but David is restricted in both movement and money. So he has told Paul a white lie: that he is going on a picnic date, when he’s actually having Tally (Jodi Balfour), a woman he’s met on an app, over for dinner. Dressed in a sexy thigh-length skirt and platform heels (pitch-perfect costumes by Sarah Laux), she is naturally disappointed when she learns that pasta, wine, and conversation are all that’s on the menu.

Balfour portrays Tally with a disillusionment that has not yet curdled into despair. A writer-actor who was raised in Moncks Corner and has recently returned from Los Angeles with her tail between her legs, she is fully aware that her life is a mess. But she has some fight left in her: “You need to quit that cult,” she flatly tells David, as if he has a choice. And yet he listens, because unlike almost everyone in his life, she hasn’t run out the door screaming.

Tafti delivers one of the most remarkable performances of the year as a man who is hanging on by a thread. His gentle anxiety conveys exactly how precarious his situation is, how the tiniest disturbance could send him hurtling into the abyss. And yet he cannot help but feel attracted to Tally’s utterly human messiness, her quiet rebellion against a rigged game. Elder millennials, they’re Jack and Rose clinging to the wreckage of the Titanic, hoping against hope that their love will keep them warm.

In a catastrophe, Mr. Rogers advises, look for the helpers. But to my knowledge, he never said anything about bourgeois exploiters masquerading as helpers, or when the price of help is modern-day serfdom. But Rosebrock has plenty to say through Paul, whom Kupferer endows with a lordly Southern paternalism that made me wish Sherman could rise from the grave just to burn a path across his pristinely manicured front lawn.

Jo Bonney has masterfully directed the actors to tiptoe right up to the border of frenzy without ever crossing into caricature. She leaves the blood-boiling emotion for the audience.

Lowcountry is presented as one long 90-minute scene with the fourth wall removed from David’s apartment, which Arnulfo Maldonado has designed with loving detail. Walgreens photos on the wall and a box of Cheerios on the fridge, it is the authentic habitat of a man who has swept up the pieces of his shattered life and has tried to reassemble them into something approaching dignity. Poorly lit on a bright summer day, it imperceptibly darkens under Heather Gilbert’s furtive lighting design, as the early evening fades to night.

Bonney’s dedication to realism extends to Ann James’s sensitive intimacy coordination, and Thomas Schall’s genuinely terrifying fight direction. These are real people in real trouble. The one bit of magic comes via John Gromada’s stealthy sound design in a moment that is bound to leave many in the audience feeling misty—for a registered sex offender.

Rosebrock isn’t the first playwright to make us feel sympathy for the devil (Bruce Norris’s Downstate comes to mind). But better than any of her peers, and as she did in Blue Ridge, she forces the audience to reassess our priors and confront the violence of our certainty. I won’t spoil the play by revealing the details of David’s crime, but I will say that were the laws indiscriminately enforced, they would render every teenager in America a sex criminal.

With Lowcountry, Rosebrock speaks up for the American precariat, telling the stories of the people we fortunate theatergoers would rather ignore. She does so with care and empathy, but also a fair amount of rage—at a system that promises freedom but delivers servitude, at cruelty disguised as charity, and most of all at a boomer-dominated ruling class that has irrevocably broken trust with the rest of the country. They won’t relinquish power willingly, so there’s only one way forward. We ready?