Up All Night with The Girls In ALL NIGHTER — Review

By the time Julia Lester inches her way down into a full split, the audience has already fallen head-over-heels in love with her. As the character with the least amount of stage time, she steals the show. 

Not that the other four women onstage aren’t doing fine work in Natalie Margolin’s uneven new play, directed by Jaki Bradley and currently playing at The Newman Mills Theater at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space. 

All Nighter takes place in 2014, five days before graduation at a college in rural Pennsylvania as a group of roommates pulls one last all-nighter to finish their last assignments. Margolin does a good job of introducing us to each character. Michelle J. Li’s pitch perfect costume design also helps establish who these women are before they even speak. There’s Darcie (Kristine Frøseth): Type-A, extremely organized; Lizzy (Havana Rose Liu): anxious, a bit of a mess; Tessa (Alyah Chanelle Scott): sporty, put-together; and Jacqueline (Kathryn Gallagher): a tough exterior that hides a softer center. At first, it seems like these characters won’t deviate much from these stock attributes, but by the end of the night, the secrets revealed shed new light on what each of these young women are hiding from their closest friends.

And then there’s Wilma, played with expert comedic timing by Julia Lester. She’s loud, over-the-top, screaming at the top of her lungs in the school library, decked out in equally loud hues of pink and purple, with ambitions both artistic and social justice oriented. She’s not one of the roommates and some members of the group are reluctant to claim her, but Wilma’s not the type to be sidelined. Hilariously, she shows up to the all-nighter with her own bright pink stool once all the chairs are claimed by the four roommates. The props design is by Andrew Diaz. 

At its best, All Nighter is a touching paean to female friendship, especially at an age when the “real world,” as the women refer to it, gets closer and closer. It’s a frightening time, especially when you’re 22 and you’re still not sure who you are. Its exploration of sexual assault, which remains a horrifying reality on college campuses, is nuanced and encompasses many of the heartbreaking difficulties and consequences. Margolin’s characters are messy and flawed, as all 22-year-olds are, at turns so confident about things they have no business being certain about and yet unafraid to admit how ill-prepared they feel for what the “real world” has in store. As director, Bradley has cultivated a believable group of young women, complete with their own shorthand and inside jokes.

It’s hard to write about All Nighter without revealing its twists. However, I can say that once the women are forced to confront certain “truths” they took for granted, Havana Rose Liu emerges as a full-fledged force on the stage. As she shirks the meeker aspects of her character, Liu blooms before us. It’s a better payoff than the play’s big reveal, which some may be able to see coming much earlier than Margolin and Bradley may want us to.

All Nighter is often hilarious and its a testament to Margolin’s writing that she handles the drama with the same amount of skill. Yes, 22-year-olds can be silly, but Margolin never allows us to only laugh at these young women. They’re fully-realized and they are to be taken seriously, even if we’ve just seen them belting their hearts out to “Wrecking Ball” by Miley Cyrus. 

All Nighter runs at the Newman Mills Theater at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space through May 18th. Tickets can be purchased here.