Broadway Play Review—Tracy Letts’ “The Minutes”

The Minutes

Written by Tracy Letts; directed by Anna D. Shapiro

Opened on April 17, 2022

Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, New York, NY

theminutesbroadway.com

The cast of Tracy Letts' The Minutes (photo: Jeremy Daniel)

Tracy Letts, our most adventurous playwright, has written everything from his early, creepily incisive character studies Bug and Killer Joe and his Tony-winning dysfunctional family epic August: Osage County to his most recent Broadway play, the lacerating midlife crisis comedy Linda Vista. Through his plays, Letts demonstrates his facility for a wide range of subject matter as well as a cutting sense of humor and a sympathy for all of his characters, however flawed.

And now there is, also on Broadway, The Minutes, Letts’ most political play yet. Although it doesn’t start out that way—at first, members of a small city council engage in amiable pre-meeting chit-chat and their meeting begins fairly innocuously—it soon devolves into in-fighting, backbiting, conspiracy theorizing and closeminded speechifying. In other words, it’s a microcosm of the sad state of democracy in America today.

When Big Cherry council newcomer Mr. Peel (Noah Reid) asks about the mysterious absence of fellow council member Mr. Carp (Ian Barford) from the evening’s meeting—Peel, away the previous week for his mother’s funeral, missed what happened to precipitate Carp’s leaving—the battle lines are drawn and, as Peel further complicates matters by requesting that the minutes from the last meeting be read to the council, the corruption, the graft and the whitewashing of the town’s history move front and center. With every succeeding comment by one of the council members, the meeting goes further off the rails, especially for those hoping to remain in power.

That summary might make The Minutes sound pretentious, but Letts’ playwriting strength is that he doesn’t telegraph anything, instead letting events occur organically from the council’s discussions to the crucial history he’s given the town of Big Cherry (whose very name, we learn, comes from a racial slur). Only at the play’s climax—when The Minutes goes from nasty but necessary political satire to an overobvious metaphor—does Letts make a slight misstep, but even in its overblown ickiness, the unsettling finale perfectly encapsulates the cultification of America in 2022 (and even 2017, when the play premiered).

As always, Letts’ writing perceptively differentiates among his characters: the nine council members and the town clerk are all individualized as much from his sharp dialogue as from the exceptional acting, which director Anna D. Shapiro astutely shepherds on David Zinn’s impressively detailed set. The production also boasts marvelous lighting by Brian MacDevitt, purposeful sound design by Andre Pluess and on-target costumes by Ana Kuzmanić. 

Letts himself plays the haughty mayor, Superba, with gusto, but he allows the other cast members to shine as well. (Letts has given each character either a blatantly descriptive name or a dull, ordinary one.) The best in the polished veteran cast are the amusingly bemused Austin Pendleton as Mr. Oldfield, the much too senior member of the council; the hilariously deadpan Jessie Mueller as Ms. Johnson, the ultra-efficient town clerk; and the intense Ian Harford, who was also terrific in Linda Vista, and who as Carp makes the most of his short onstage time to thoughtfully focus the themes of the play, which brilliantly paves the way for Letts and Shapiro’s final, disturbing coup de théâtre.