Rhoda Feng
Quiet chaos, comedic sparks, Bette Midler tunes: Abby Rosebrock’s play illuminates the fragile emotional dynamics of a Tinder dinner date.
Babak Tafti as David in Lowcountry. Photo: Ahron R. Foster.
Lowcountry, written by Abby Rosebrock, directed by Jo Bonney, Linda Gross Theater, 336 West Twentieth Street, New York City,
through July 13, 2025
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Early on in Abby Rosebrock’s 2019 play Blue Ridge, a group of halfway-house residents engage in a game called “Tree or Stalin.” The setup is simple: someone names a thing—“a person, a place, animal, anything in the world”—and the others decide whether it’s more like a tree or more like Stalin. Right at the start of Lowcountry, Rosebrock’s slow-burning play now making its premiere at the Linda Gross Theater, we’re confronted with a man who wafts of Stalin. He’s not onstage, not yet; he manifests initially as a voice on speakerphone. A sponsor in a twelve-step program for sex addiction, Paul (Keith Kupferer) offers advice with the pasteurized pomposity of someone who’s made enough money—and mistakes—to feel entitled to both. He compares himself to Poseidon, makes casual references to ICE, shouts at his grandkids frolicking in his backyard, and talks down to his “deadbeat friend.”
Babak Tafti as David in Lowcountry. Photo: Ahron R. Foster.
That “friend” would be David (Babak Tafti), a Brown man in his late thirties Paul is sponsoring, who is alone onstage as the show begins and is readying dinner for an imminent Tinder date. At one point in this largely one-sided conversation, Paul, who is white, encourages David to lean into his race—to use his “immigrant thing” and the fact that he was adopted (“all the teens sayin that’s trauma now”)—to obtain unsupervised overnight visits with his teenage son, who lives with his ex-wife. In a previous life, David had worked as a high-school physical education teacher and basketball coach. He enrolled in the SA program after he was revealed to have exchanged racy text messages with a seventeen-year-old girl at his school; a restraining order was also put in place after he sent some “really intense, argumentative emails about custody stuff” to his ex. As Paul talks at him, David cooks pasta in the kitchenette of his South Carolina studio, which is divided by a flimsy curtain, the kind you might see in a hospital ward or a college dorm. Throughout the play, it falls down repeatedly—a visual metaphor that feels, frankly, a little too eager to announce itself. (Arnulfo Maldonado designed the grungy set.)
David is a line cook at the Waffle House and is freshly out of an ankle bracelet, but a carceral logic still chaperones his movements and guides his inner monologue. We sense him mentally arm wrestling with his own inner Stalin when he glances at the three bottles of wine sitting on a counter or when he matter-of-factly discloses to Paul that “every good restaurant’s close to a school.” One wrong move during his tryst and everything—his enrollment in the sex-addiction program, his custody arrangement, his fragile sense of control—might collapse.
Babak Tafti as David and Jodi Balfour as Tally in Lowcountry. Photo: Ahron R. Foster.
The arrival of Tally—David’s Tinder match—raises the play’s heart rate. An unemployed actress doing editing gigs and manifesting dreams, she swiftly gets herself drunk. She’s also ovulating (or claims to be), wants to have sex, is nonplussed by David’s sex-pest history, and says she wants to care for him, as if volunteering for a job no one asked her to fill. Jodi Balfour gives a performance of remarkable dimension. Her Tally is quick to charm and quicker to unravel, full of contradictions she doesn’t always feel compelled to reconcile. She freely adjusts the lighting in David’s studio, kills a cockroach with a bare hand (and wipes the evidence on her skirt), climbs a ladder in platform heels to fix the fallen curtain, and lights a joint. (She may or may not be an older incarnation of the twelve-year-old Tally in Rosebrock’s Wilma, the first work in her “Good Girl Trilogy.”) Over the course of 100 minutes, it also emerges that Tally knows—intuits is too watery a word—more about David than she has let on.
Jodi Balfour as Tally in Lowcountry. Photo: Ahron R. Foster.
Tafti’s David is a coiled spring. He’s guarded without being aloof, not so much wary of Tally as of his own impulses. His desire is palpable, but what stands out is the quiet effort of repression—the way he tidies his apartment, busies himself with boiling pasta and grating parmesan, and carefully avoids answering certain questions. He’s trying to be the version of himself that his program, his sponsor, and the courts might approve of.
Jodi Balfour as Tally and Babak Tafti as David in Lowcountry. Photo: Ahron R. Foster.
Some of what transpires in Lowcountry seems more dramatically than emotionally motivated; you’d need to be a true clairvoyant to predict the ending. As with Blue Ridge, Lowcountry is observationally paced and fastidiously committed to showing people not in recovery—which suggests both passivity and a terminus—but recovering. Rosebrock’s plays, with their swaybacked action, dwell in the nooks and crannies of that conjugated state. Music is a social lubricant for even the most staunchly unsentimental of her characters, unlatching the door of their emotions. In Blue Ridge, Alison, who recently took an axe to her former flame’s car tires, expounds on her passion for not one, but two Carrie Underwood songs. David, in Lowcountry, tells Tally that music makes him “extremely sad”—and later breaks down to “From a Distance,” with its synth intro and Bette Midler’s voice bobbing about like a flashlight in the woods. As he listens to the tune’s refrains of “peace” and “harmony,” David seems to grieve not only the choices that led to a miserable life, but the cost of numbing away his feelings.
Babak Tafti as David and Jodi Balfour as Tally in Lowcountry. Photo: Ahron R. Foster.
Lowcountry opened just a few years after the New York premiere of Bruce Norris’s Downstate, another play about men living under the weight of past sexual transgressions. But while Downstate cast its discomfort across a group home filled with stringent rules for former offenders, the micro-naturalistic Lowcountry zooms in on the private negotiations—between sponsor and sponsee, date and host, parent and court system—that occur outside the fishbowl of constant surveillance. Jo Bonney’s deep-focus direction doles out jaunty humor alongside hopelessness. Tension builds from the uncertainty of what David and Tally will or won’t allow themselves to feel, but sparks of comedy are also cast off by the simple spectacle of people trying to gauge just how emotionally transparent they should be with each other. In one scene, the limber Tally tells David about energy centers on the body and shows him where his root chakra is.
Babak Tafti as David and Jodi Balfour as Tally in Lowcountry. Photo: Ahron R. Foster.
Just as Rosebrock has little use for off-the-rack sentiments about therapeutic stations of the cross, Lowcountry refuses to jerk itself toward a neat resolution. The end of the play, which I am contractually bound not to spoil, flicked my mind back to the parlor game “Tree or Stalin.” It’s prima facie ridiculous: the opposition of the two entities, like so many dichotomies, founders upon articulation. Yet trees have an indubitable advantage over Stalin. For one thing, they recall Baucis and Philemon, the two beggars in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who are turned into a linden and an oak after offering their hospitality to gods in disguise. As Alison, the ex-grinding former English teacher in Blue Ridge, might have pointed out, we fallible creatures are always mis-recognizing one another. Lowcountry, even more than Blue Ridge, lives in the quiet chaos of misprision—in what’s half-remembered or misapprehended, in the long latency of being seen. True recognition is rare, but when it happens, the effect is transfiguring.
Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer based in Washington, DC.