NEW YORK — When I first saw Tracy Letts’ “The Minutes” in 2017 in Chicago, director Anna D. Shapiro’s sizzling Steppenwolf Theatre production felt like a takedown of Donald Trump’s triumphalist America, too engaged in self-promotion to confront the unsavory aspects of its own origin story.
Thanks to COVID-19, the show’s move to Broadway took years, not minutes. Trump is gone, maybe. But this intense play now feels aimed not so much at Trumpism but at how small-town councils and school-board meetings are turning into war zones, their traditional reliance on Robert’s Rules of Order supplanted not just by screaming matches but by quietly devastating executions of majority power. One community at a time.
As we all know, whatever side we’re on, small-town democracy is fast turning into a zero-sum American game. Each side is out for blood. That’s what “The Minutes” is about.
In this play — which features a Steppenwolf-heavy ensemble cast comprised of Ian Barford, Blair Brown, Cliff Chamberlain, K. Todd Freeman, Danny McCarthy, Jessie Mueller, Sally Murphy, Austin Pendleton, Jeff Still, the excellent newcomer Noah Reid as the town dentist and the scary playwright himself as the town mayor — Letts is continuing the theme that dominates his best-known play to date, “August: Osage County.”
In that hit Broadway play (which became a movie), the playwright drew from his own familial and institutional history to suggest that the presence of a bunch of warring white academics on land once belonging to Native Americans was sufficiently delegitimizing as to rip apart a dysfunctional, modern-day family overly imbued with its own self-justifying mythology.
“The Minutes,” set in the council chamber of fictional Big Cherry (which feels like a town in Texas or Letts’ native Oklahoma), looks not at a group related by bloodlines, but by a collective determination not to examine a town’s own past. That communal self-mythologizing is encapsulated in an origin story into which everyone buys, whether they are business people, retirees or the mayor himself. And, as the play progresses, the determination of this group not to allow themselves to be challenged grows more intense by the minute. That’s all you need to know.
Letts has structured the work as a mystery: Reid’s dentist wants to know what has happened to the minutes of a previous meeting and why a potential whistleblower (played with earnest intensity by Barford) has disappeared. The clerk (dryly played by Mueller) appears to be on the dentist’s side. Surely the one Black guy in the room is an ally? Maybe the business guys? Maybe the goofy retiree, played by Pendleton, benign until his character is threatened?
But the mayor, played by Letts with the menace of surety, knows how to execute the kind of collective power too much for any dentist. And that circling of the wagons is what you get to watch here, as performed by a cast with no weak links.
For a play written some five years ago now, the work still retains remarkable currency. It’s not as if American democracy suddenly is feeling more secure. And it’s another example of powerful Steppenwolf acting, not the showcase “August: Osage County” afforded, but a symphony of provincial low-burn tyranny, nonetheless. You might be put in mind of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Or “Stranger Things.” Or a grown up version of “Lord of the Flies.” As is typical with Letts, there is much noir humor. The character names alone tell you plenty: Mayor Superba (Letts), Mr. Carp (Barford), Mr. Oldfield (Pendleton), Ms. Innes (Brown), Mr. Breeding (Chamberlain); Mr. Assalone (Still); Mr. Hanratty (McCarthy) and, of course, Mr. Peel (back, Reid).
I wish Shapiro’s powerful original production had not been obliged by all the COVID-19 chaos to move to Studio 54, a bigger theater than ideal and a space that diffuses some of the original intensity of the piece, especially since people moving on and off microphones is baked into the play.
Still, “The Minutes,” which has a set from David Zinn that deliciously parodies small-town self-mythologizing, can survive that.
It’s an important play, a visceral theatrical experience, all about what has happened to retail American democracy and how this nation decides on which stories about itself it wants to believe.
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“The Minutes” is on Broadway at Studio 54, 254 West 54th St. New York; theminutesbroadway.com
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