Frontmezzjunkies reports: Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir Delivers a Hilarious and Deeply Moving Off-Broadway Debut
By Ross
He lies there. Sprawled beside a large suitcase, still and silent, as the audience settles into the main stage at Atlantic Theater Company for Jake Brasch’s The Reservoir. Muffled Madonna plays faintly in the background. For a moment, we simply watch and wonder. Is he dead? Is he sleeping? Did we accidentally wander into the aftermath of a very confusing beach vacation? Then a flash of light jolts him awake, and we breathe a sigh of relief. After an initial “Where am I?“, he adds, “This is actually a really nice beach,” with dreamy certainty, gazing out toward us with fuzzy eyes, and listing the gay colours he sees before him. The mountains in the distance eventually give the location away. He is near Denver, the place he once called home. How he arrived there remains a mystery even to him.
This is our young pseudo-hero, Josh, played with a beautiful, restless energy by Noah Galvin (“The Good Doctor“). His life has unraveled once again, through a familiar cycle of drink, blackout, confusion, and desperate self-analysis. One moment, he is dodging a curious police officer with a quick burst of charm, the next he is crawling through the dog door of his mother’s house before collapsing into sleep, hoping to drift past the worst early hours of having no alcohol in his system. Josh talks to us constantly, about his brain, his drinking, his so-called sobriety, and the endless negotiations he conducts with all these contradictory parts. The play gleefully demolishes the fourth wall, inviting the audience directly into his spinning thoughts, creating the most lively of conversations that feels both intimate and hilariously candid.
Written with a sharp wit, depth, and intelligence by Jake Brasch (HOLE!) and directed with a clear sense of rhythm by Shelley Butler (Kate Hamill’s The Scarlet Letter at Two River Theater), The Reservoir is a dazzlingly funny and unexpectedly tender play about addiction, memory, and the strange pathways where those struggles intersect. Josh believes he has stumbled upon a theory that might connect his own addiction with the Alzheimer’s disease affecting his beloved Nana Irene, played with luminous warmth by Mary Beth Peil (Broadway’s Les Liaisons Dangereuses). His idea is something he calls a “cognitive reservoir,” a way to redirect the fast-moving river of thoughts that overwhelm. But he tends to only skip across the surface of this theory without ever really diving in completely. His grandparents sit nearby in a row of white chairs, reacting to his declarations with a mixture of concern, amusement, and love that fills the room with life.
Thankfully, Josh is not left alone inside this storm of thoughts. Brasch wisely surrounds him with a wonderful company of performers who bring both humour and emotional weight to the story. The fantastically gifted Matthew Saldívar (Broadway’s Junk) moves through multiple roles with an appealing ease that keeps the play lively, thoughtful, and engaging, while Chip Zien (Broadway’s Harmony) gives Grandpa Shrimpy a gentle sweetness that quietly anchors many scenes with his desperation and need, without any of them slipping into the saccharin waters. Peter Maloney (ATC’s On The Shore of the Wide World) brings a complicated but wondrously wounded presence as Josh’s other grandfather, a man struggling with forgiveness and the limits of patience against a sea of grief and sadness. Together they create a portrait of family and friends that feels messy, loving, and deeply human.
Then there is the magnificent Caroline Aaron (Off-Broadway’s Conversations with Mother) as Beverly, Josh’s other grandmother. Aaron storms into the play with the confidence of someone who has seen every excuse before and refuses to indulge another one. Her speech confronting Josh lands with thrilling clarity. Under her watchful gaze, something shifts inside him. For the first time, his attention turns inward rather than outward, and the possibility of real change begins to flicker to life. Josh’s mother, portrayed with quiet strength by Heidi Armbruster (Rattlestick’s Lewiston/Clarkston), watches this whole transformation with the complicated mixture of hope and exhaustion that only a parent could understand. And we feel for them all, including the complex Josh, understanding each and every posture, pain, and proud moment.
The physical staging of The Reservoir is strikingly simple, and a tad bland, except for those great props. The set by Takeshi Kata (PH’s The Profane) remains something of a blank slate. If there is a deeper metaphor hiding inside those rising and falling curtains, it flowed past me before I could catch it. Fortunately, the play hardly needs the help. Jiyoung Chang’s lighting and Kate Marvin’s sound and original music supply the emotional texture that carries Josh’s wandering mind from memory to memory. Costumes by Sara Ryung Clement (MTC’s Golden Shield) gently ground the characters in a recognizable everyday world where humour and heartbreak exist side by side.
What makes The Reservoir so captivating is the electricity of its writing. Brasch fills the play with sharp observations and wonderfully unexpected jokes that arrive almost faster than the audience can catch them. Yet beneath that humour sits something gentler and wiser. The play feels as though it was written from a place of hard-earned understanding, a voice that has looked honestly at chaos, addiction, and memory and still chosen warmth and humour. One particularly sweet running gag about Anne with an E, described lovingly as that “sweet Canadian orphan,” earned one of the evening’s warmest laughs, especially for this Canadian theatre critic who will always have a soft spot for that famously earnest orphan.
At the center of it all stands the impossibly good Galvin, delivering the perfect balance of Josh’s intelligence, chaos, charm, and vulnerability with remarkable ease. Josh may not fully understand his own theory yet. He may barely understand himself. Still, his search for answers pulls us along with him.
By the time the play reaches its final moments, we realize we have spent the evening inside Josh’s restless mind, following every detour, wrong turn, and sudden burst of clarity. It is a chaotic place, occasionally exhausting, often hilarious, and unexpectedly full of love. And that discovery is what makes The Reservoir so special, a play that finds hope not in fixing the mind, but in learning how to live inside it.
