reviewed<\/a> Jacob Perkins\u2019 The Dinosaurs at Playwrights Horizons, a gentle, time-eliding look at the lives of six women in a recovery meeting. This week, Jake Brasch\u2019s The Reservoir opened at Atlantic Theater Company and, though it shares some DNA with The Dinosaurs, it could not be further from its midtown cousin.\u00a0<\/p>\nJosh (Noah Galvin) wakes up in Colorado and isn\u2019t sure how he got there. The last thing he remembers is getting kicked out of rehab in Miami, yet here he is on the bank of the Cherry Creek Reservoir with an inexplicable wound on his forearm. His mother (Heidi Armbruster) is certainly also surprised to see him, considering the thousands of dollars she\u2019s paid for his treatment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Josh makes a go at sobriety, he gets a job in a local bookstore and spends time with his four grandparents. Hank (Peter Maloney) and Irene (Mary Beth Peil) have recently moved to an assisted care facility as Irene is in the late stages of Alzheimer\u2019s, which comes as a shock to Josh. He\u2019d been too consumed with his own trials to learn that his grandmother was sick. His other grandmother, Beverly (Caroline Aaron), is a ball-busting, tough-love type, long divorced from his grandfather, Shrimpy (Chip Zien). As Josh attempts a better life for himself, he develops an obsession with improving the lives of his grandparents, too \u2013 perhaps as a distraction from his own troubles.<\/p>\n
The Reservoir is an against-all-odds comedy. There\u2019s alcoholism, there\u2019s Alzheimer\u2019s, there\u2019s a fractured family, but it\u2019s still so goddamn funny at every turn. It\u2019s incredibly sweet, too, but not in the usual way where you want to sigh and roll your eyes. It\u2019s sentimental, yet remains dramatically taut and, at times, harrowing. Brasch has created a family of characters you can\u2019t help but love, each of them a little kooky, each of them with an enormous heart. That\u2019s the real feat of Brasch\u2019s writing: the subject matter is tough, but the play is infused with optimism \u2013 not in a blind way, though. It\u2019s cautiously hopeful.<\/p>\n
Director Shelley Butler\u2019s production is set amidst a series of blue fabric panels representing the titular reservoir and, more potently, the \u201criver of thought\u201d that is constantly flowing through Josh\u2019s brain. Takeshi Kata\u2019s design evokes that well, but the set does feel a bit empty and a motorized platform that occasionally brings on furniture sticks out in the production\u2019s overall ethos. Butler, Kata, costume designer Sara Ryung Clement, and lighting designer Jiyoung Chang have embraced color \u2013 and lots of it. This world is far from drab and depressing, it\u2019s vibrant. The physical environment is in keeping with Brasch\u2019s play: we\u2019re talking about serious things here, but we\u2019re not letting that define us. It\u2019s full of life.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Each of the grandparents is well cast and they\u2019re all game for the sometimes ribald humor in Brasch\u2019s dialogue. Armbruster again proves that she\u2019s one of the most underrated actors on the stage and Matthew Sald\u00edvar is excellent in a variety of supporting roles.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But it\u2019s really Galvin\u2019s central performance that makes the play. Galvin\u2019s Josh is kind of weird, kind of goofy, and intensely magnetic. He\u2019s unafraid to take a moment to process what\u2019s happening, to search for what to do or say. He\u2019s lost \u2013 he knows it, we all know it \u2013 and even surrounded by people who have fostered him with, apparently, nothing but love, he still finds himself without answers. Josh narrates to the audience throughout the play and Galvin finds a way to play this direct address without the kind of oratory overtones a lesser actor would fall into. His Josh is casual, easy to listen to, easy to believe. It\u2019s one of the most assured, confident performances I\u2019ve seen in a while.<\/p>\n
The Reservoir wisely skirts the kind of teary, chest-pounding drama it could easily have fallen into. Instead, it leaves those tears to the audience. Brasch wins us over with humor and heart and then lets us also feel the loss when it arrives. Josh loves his family, Brasch loves his characters, and I love this play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Reservoir\u201d at Atlantic Theater Company (Photo: Ahron R. Foster) Isn\u2019t it funny that within weeks of each…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":147546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64],"class_list":{"0":"post-147545","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-new-york","9":"tag-ny","10":"tag-nyc","11":"tag-nyc-headlines","12":"tag-nyc-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=147545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/147545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=147545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=147545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=147545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\""The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/ReservoirDress.0523.2-scaled.jpg\" "\\"\"The")
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