Is there anything more American than a town council meeting? It’s apple pie, baseball, and sales tax all tied up in a starred-and-striped bow of civic virtue. The particular meeting that unfurls, in real time, in The Minutes, flows from the brutal imagination of the playwright Tracy Letts. So no prizes for guessing that this session will include business more vicious than debates over plans for the annual harvest festival.
Our guide for the evening is Mr Peel (Noah Reid of Schitt’s Creek), a pediatric dentist and a new electee. He is also, significantly, an incomer, brought to this particular small town, Big Cherry, by his wife. Mr. Peel had to miss the last council meeting – he left town to attend his mother’s funeral – and he enters this one slightly confused. Where is his friend Mr Carp? And why have the previous minutes not been distributed? But no one is talking. Not Letts’s Mayor Superba, not Jessie Mueller’s clerk, not any other member.
