The all-nighter is a time-honored tradition of higher education (and also — let’s be honest, as I write this review in the late evening hours — of journalism). The best kind of all-nighter isn’t the solo cram session but a social event, a time of bonding through exhaustion and desperation, with the aid of caffeine and junk food.
So if you take a group of five college seniors, some stimulants and a few secrets, then throw them together into a pressure cooker in the form of a nightlong work session, there should be plenty of extracurricular drama to go around. But by the time the sun comes up in “All Nighter,” which opened Sunday at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, this underwhelming play feels as if it has left a lot of unfinished work on the table.
The play, written by Natalie Margolin, takes place in a college in rural Pennsylvania in 2014. It’s finals week at the Johnson Ballroom, a 24-hour student lounge, and this loyal cohort of study-buddies-slash-roomies includes the anxious and often flustered Liz (Havana Rose Liu); the organized and put-together Darcie (Kristine Froseth), who’s aiming for law school; the well-off Tessa (Alyah Chanelle Scott), who has a love for athleisure clothes; and the sentimental Jacqueline (Kathryn Gallagher), who is latching onto the last moments of college before departing for “the real world.” And then fashionably — or, depending on who asks, unfashionably — late to the party is the wild and eccentric Wilma (Julia Lester, the priceless Little Red Riding Hood in the 2022 “Into the Woods” revival on Broadway), dressed in floral cowboy boots, pink and black knee-highs and pink marble leggings, and fully accessorized.
The students get down to some work but not without a few interpersonal revelations — lingering tiffs, secrets and suspicions from the partying they had done the night before. And then there are the mysterious disappearances in their house, like Liz’s missing Adderall pills and Tessa’s lost credit card.
Margolin’s script playfully replicates the mannerisms and tropes of college friendships, especially among women, like the chorus of affirmations girlfriends will automatically offer another in need, or the defensive positions they deploy when someone’s enemy walks into the room.
But with one or two identifying characteristics each, these young women lack dimension for them to read as much more than generic college-girl types. And because “All Nighter” fails as it tries to establish a sense of the bonds that have developed over their four years together, it then isn’t able to fully show the tenuousness of these friendships.
The direction, by Jaki Bradley, could stand to be more pointed; at several instances during the play the group splits off, with two or more characters sitting or standing in a spotlight off to the side of the main action. Sometimes two conversations happen in tandem, the spotlight alternating between the two, but there’s little to suggest the correlation or contrast among these simultaneous scenes.
Despite the limitations of the script and the direction, there are standouts in the cast. Liu’s performance pops when Liz is most anxious and vulnerable, and Lester immediately brightens up the stage as Wilma, providing a much-needed dose of chaotic energy.
Wilson Chin’s spacious, airy set design strikes a balance that the play lacks. The generic college dorm chairs, gathered around a large wooden study table near a pillar taped with notices for things like the “Spring Career Fair,” all evoke the insular world of college life. But the open feel of the Johnson Ballroom, with its panoramic windows, suggests everything that lies beyond, in the adult world.
“All Nighter” inches toward some interesting themes: the disparate ways these young women view their friendships; how much these relationships are defined by the ways they’ve unknowingly shamed, gaslit and hurt one another; how much they act as enablers instead of holding their friends to account. But it ends up reminding you of more interesting recent adolescent comedies like “Bottoms” and “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” which, ironically, both feature members of this cast. (Liu in “Bottoms,” Scott in “Sex Lives.”)
As is, these characters fold underneath the weight of these themes. The play falls apart as it tries to find its resolution: one character’s big reveal is awkwardly dropped a few minutes before curtain, inviting more questions than answers. And the play’s last gesture, a heavy-handed metaphor about the morning bringing these friends into an unknown future, does little more than emphasize the depth absent in the material.
Throughout “All Nighter” the young women gripe and fret about productivity — how productive they’ve been with their studies, how productive or unproductive they’ve been with their personal lives, how annoying the group of productive students camped out at their usual table is. But for all the shared Adderall and rapid study scenes in this play, in the end “All Nighter” proves to be about as unproductive as this group of students.
All Nighter
Through May 18 at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space, Manhattan; allnighterplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes.
