{"id":187993,"date":"2026-04-07T06:07:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T06:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/187993\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T06:07:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T06:07:15","slug":"theater-review-nyc-rebecca-de-mornay-in-the-pushover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/187993\/","title":{"rendered":"Theater Review (NYC): Rebecca De Mornay in ‘The Pushover’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Acutely drawn personalities, snappy dialogue, and plenty of humor have reliably characterized the stage work<\/a> of John Patrick Shanley (Doubt, Moonstruck) over time<\/a>. That\u2019s what makes the strained and confused The Pushover, his new full-length one-act, so disappointing. A zany story of three women entangled in an erotic web of business, crime, and relationship chaos, it might conceivably have worked if it had gone all the way into absurdity. But played straight, this script and these characters with all their yelling just don\u2019t make sense.<\/p>\n

That forces the cast, which includes Rebecca De Mornay of \u201980s and \u201990s movie fame, to have to work too hard \u2013 to act too hard \u2013 trying to manifest depth and pathos that simply aren\u2019t there. The Pushover did mostly hold my attention, but mostly because I kept expecting the story to click somehow, for logic or at least sense to emerge.<\/p>\n

De Mornay plays Evelyn, a manipulative, cruel and possibly sociopathic woman who has escaped a marriage to an apparently equally awful man into a series of relationships with women. Though she has no empathy for others, we do come to see Evelyn\u2019s own vulnerability and a long-hidden key to her personality eventually. But the play and De Mornay\u2019s fiery yet somehow static performance don\u2019t give us reason to care.<\/p>\n

\"Christina\"ChristinaChristina Toth (Shawn Salley Photography)<\/p>\n

First, though, me meet Pearl (hotly embodied by Di Zhu), an ex of Evelyn\u2019s who remains under the older woman\u2019s sway. To a therapist (played woodenly by Christopher Sutton) she unpeels some of her psyche: She\u2019s a chef and entrepreneur, religious and volatile. <\/p>\n

Then we\u2019re at Evelyn\u2019s residential spa where Evelyn has summoned Soochi (Christina Toth), an ex-lover and business partner of Pearl\u2019s who has fleeced Pearl out of all her money. Toth\u2019s performance is satisfyingly dangerous for a while, making the story come to life briefly and haltingly, but as the tale grows more unlikely, we start to realize that all that acting is signifying nothing much. Pearl especially is a figure I found myself really wanting to like, but her stubbornness and inability to see what was right in front of her grew impossible to believe after a while \u2013 the character isn\u2019t given adequate realistic depth.<\/p>\n

The story ultimately tries to draw a dichotomy between \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d people. The mystery is whether Soochi is truly a manipulative schemer, like Evelyn, or whether she has a heart, or a \u201csoul\u201d in the play\u2019s parlance, that\u2019s merely been subsumed by desperate circumstances. Pearl, for her part, refuses to believe that either of the other women is a truly bad person, even in a climactic scene where violence breaks out. And what about Pearl herself? Her hands aren\u2019t exactly clean in all the mishigas. But none of it makes character-sense any more than the play makes story-sense.<\/p>\n

The laughs are few and of the cheapest insult-comedy kind. We wait and wait for something to solidify. In the end it\u2019s not Soochi who lacks a soul, nor Evelyn. It\u2019s The Pushover.<\/p>\n

The Pushover is at the Chain Theatre<\/a> through April 26.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Acutely drawn personalities, snappy dialogue, and plenty of humor have reliably characterized the stage work of John Patrick…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187994,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[71779,9,56,63,65,64,34384,75366,75367,16487],"class_list":{"0":"post-187993","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york-city","8":"tag-john-patrick-shanley","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-ny","11":"tag-nyc","12":"tag-nyc-headlines","13":"tag-nyc-news","14":"tag-off-broadway","15":"tag-pushover","16":"tag-rebecca-de-mornay","17":"tag-theater-review"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187993","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=187993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}