Off-Broadway Play Review—Alexis Scheer’s “Breaking the Story” with Maggie Siff

Breaking the Story

Written by Alexis Scheer; directed by Jo Bonney

Performances through June 23, 2024

Second Stage Theater, 305 West 43rd Street, New York, NY

2st.com

Louis Ozawa and Maggie Siff in Breaking the Story (photo: Joan Marcus)

Alexis Scheer’s Breaking the Story opens with a literal bang, jolting not only the audience but also Marina, a seasoned foreign correspondent who’s been covering troubled regions for decades. Marina and Bear, her colleague, photographer and fiancé, are presumed dead after the explosion; when the dust settles, she and Bear are in a quiet place in Wellesley, Massachusetts, where Marina grew up and where she has bought a large house with a lot of property. She muses aloud whether to retire after this weekend, when she’s getting a lifetime achievement award for her work.

Also present are Marina’s daughter Cruz, an aspiring singer thinking of forgoing college to Marina’s consternation (Cruz’s songs, cowritten by Scheer, punctuate the action); Gummy, Marina’s sardonic mother; Sonia, Cruz’s godmother; Fed, TV news anchor, Marina’s ex and Cruz’s dad; and Nikki, a young, ambitious war journalist who’s in town to give Marina her award. Marina and Bear plan to get married in these bucolic surroundings, but Marina’s PTSD intrudes, fragments of her war exploits haunting her—as she wonders whether she was a good enough mother to Cruz while dodging bullets in faraway lands. Marina’s also worried that a long-held secret might damage her reputation: She wasn’t fully truthful in her reporting at her first war-zone catastrophe years earlier. 

Although 80 minutes are not enough to create a properly complex portrait, Scheer and always resourceful director Jo Bonney intrepidly probe Marina’s scarred and battered psyche with a series of quick snapshots that alternate black humor with seriousness, even if the more surreal moments (like a funny but odd cake tasting sequence) are too fleeting to truly hit the mark. Still, it leads to a well-executed Twilight Zone-esque twist ending, as the final moments return to the very beginning. There are bits in the dialogue that hint at where Scheer is going with her story, and it effectively visualizes the gulf between Marina’s exciting foreign exploits and her relatively dull civilian existence.

Julie Halston is her usual boisterous self as Gummy, while Geneva Carr is an effulgent Sonia, Gabrielle Policano a winning Cruz, Tala Ashe a lively Nikki, Louis Ozawa an endearing Bear and Matthew Salvidar an efficient Fed. At the center stands Maggie Siff, whose Marina is marvelously shaded; as usual, Siff elevates Scheer’s writing with her compelling presence. Now that Billions is over, maybe we’ll get more of Siff onstage.