ROAD KILLS: Picking Up Streetside Compassion — Review

Working within the conventions of the mismatched two-hander, Sophie McIntosh continues her subversion of genre with Road Kills, which pairs a kind-hearted carrion collector with a bratty college student fulfilling a six-week community service sentence. It also reteams the playwright with the director Nina Goodheart, with whom she operates the Good Apples theater collective. As in last year’s surreal cunnicularii, the two collaborators create a world of both great, heightened theatricality and poignant, earthy humanity. 

The play’s sights are set on a series of Saturday sessions between Owen (D.B. Milliken) and the recalcitrant Jaki (Mia Sinclair Jenness). Details around the events which led her to this punishment are, of course, only gradually revealed, but it is made quickly evident that the young’un’s carelessness has landed herself in legal hot water which her family lawyers have significantly cooled for her. That privilege notwithstanding, she still tries to shirk her responsibilities as they clean up roadkill along desolate Wisconsin highways; Owen does most of the dirty work, she “spots” from the side.

Road Kills functions perfectly as the odd-couple situation it proposes, its characters learning from and about each other through furtive, often funny, interactions. When they’re called to scoop up a dearly departed dog, for example, he sees her lash out at its owner (Michael Lepore) in a way that hints at more than misdirected teen anger. But that incident gives way to the play’s larger meditations on duty, carelessness and compassion. And its setting in McIntosh’s home state seems personal and symbolic without condescending toward any notion of the middle country’s heartland.

Rather, the expansiveness of its roads – rendered in Junran “Charlotte” Shi’s pleasing set as an infinite stretch, with the audience seated longways across one of its sides – suggests an ongoingness of the play’s themes and characters.

A preternatural master of mood, Goodheart reassembles some of the cunnicularii team (including Milliken) to create a similarly cinematic effect. Paige Seber’s lightning comes in striking flashes or gradual, ominous fades. The pink Stanley cup which costumier Saawan Tiwari provides Jaki conveys just about everything necessary to get on her page. And between each scene, Max Van’s sound sketches each roadkill’s demise through disembodied cabin conversations, sketching portraits of the casual recklessness Owen has deigned himself to clean up.

Unlike Jaki, who fights against a predetermined life within her powerful family’s company, Owen picks up his late old man’s job with pride. His incredible patience with her is a window into the monk-like existence he shares with his aging mother, though the play is too smart to let this be a simple question of humility versus obstinance. (Milliken, who immediately scans as genuinely sweet, as well as the expressively-eyed Jenness, also acquit themselves of playing into their roles’ simplest attributes, finding deeper dimensions for each.)

It wouldn’t be a McIntosh play if it didn’t also acutely explore women’s impossible circumstances. This thread is pulled towards the end of the 80-minute production, almost as a bonus tie-in to the rest of her growing (and consistently excellent) oeuvre. Until then, Road Kills doesn’t coast, so much as journey imperceptibly through thematic terrain that might seem to bend, but which the writer’s firm hand navigates straight through.

Road Kills is in performance through September 6, 2025 at the Paradise Factory on East 4th Street in New York City. For tickets and more information, visit here.