‘Off Peak’ Review: Caught in Limbo on the Northbound Track

The set of the new play “Off Peak” could have earned its own section in the Umberto Eco essay “Travels in Hyperreality” — doubly so since it is a hyperreal representation of travel. We are in a meticulous facsimile of a Metro-North car, three rows from the door. New Yorkers will be familiar with those blue and maroon vinyl seats, with that floor, encrusted with the grime of a million commutes. A newspaper and a paper coffee cup have been left behind, for good measure.

This is so close to life that you expect a conductor to come in at any second. But that never happens, because despite intercom announcements letting us know that the train is the local to Poughkeepsie, Brenda Withers’s play feels as if it’s taking place in an almost ghostly limbo at odds with Sasha Schwartz’s lifelike replica of a set: “They don’t take our tickets, they don’t check on us, no one comes through,” a passenger named Sarita (Nance Williamson) says.

She’s talking to Martin (Kurt Rhoads), the only other person in the play and, apparently, on the train — except for the unseen conductor (voiced by Doug Ballard), who gives intermittent updates on station arrivals. Soon enough, he informs Martin and Sarita that the train has to make an emergency stop.

The pair, who are in their mid-50s, haven’t seen each other in almost 20 years and are catching up, a little awkwardly at first. After a few minutes of chit-chat, it’s obvious that they used to be a bit closer than mere acquaintances. The conversation continues — for longer than either would have expected, thanks to the delay — and whoa, Martin and Sarita are a lot more than near-strangers on a train.

She is the livelier character, and there is a lovely quickness to Williamson’s performance, with a soupçon of neurosis and a touch of defensiveness (maybe that’s why Sarita tends to prattle a bit). Rhoads does whatever he can with a more stolid role. He and Williamson must be accustomed to spending time together in tight quarters: They have been married for almost four decades and regularly act together — they played the title characters in Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival’s production of “Romeo and Juliet” this summer. Upstate is also where Jess Chayes’s production of “Off Peak,” currently at 59E59 Theaters, originated, at the Westchester County home of the presenting Hudson Stage Company.

If Martin appears to play offense, it’s because he has a past, and an agenda. After he whips out an envelope filled with $4,000, it takes Sarita way too long to realize that it was not chance that placed them in the same car of the same train at the same time. He cornered her — there is no other word for what he’s doing — because he wants to make amends. He has grown up since they were together, he tells Sarita (whose behavior when she first saw him now makes more sense), and he even starts bandying about words like “patriarchy” and “sexism.”

To Withers’s credit, “Off Peak” does not veer into account-settling, because Sarita refuses to play Martin’s game. She is not swayed by his new allyship and its accompanying self-flagellation, does not want to be stuck in the role of victim he is trying to assign her. What Withers is less comfortable doing is making a good case for why Sarita sticks around and endures Martin when she could just move to another seat in another painstakingly detailed car.

Off Peak
Through Dec. 23 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes.