Off-Limits Love
- Jonathan Kalb
- Jun 30
- 4 min read
Abby Rosebrock’s Lowcountry, a new play directed by Jo Bonney at the Atlantic Theater, begins with a weird power game overheard on a cell phone. It then proceeds to a seemingly straightforward, desire-soaked Tinder date between 30-something millennials, which takes some very surprising turns that leave you unsure what’s really happening.
David and Tally, the daters, turn out not to be complete strangers after all, and Tally hints at some radical political views. The actors of these roles are superb, so focused on their erotic negotiation most of the time that their heat disguises all the plot’s curve balls, including a shocking finale suggesting we may have just seen a revenge play. This revenge—whose details I won’t spoil—is an apparent act of vigilantism against patriarchal abuse of power.
The setting is David’s cheap studio apartment (designed with charmless panache by Arnulfo Maldonado) in Moncks Corner, South Carolina—the trashy “lowcountry” of the title. David is a fit, athletic “brown” guy, born abroad and raised from infancy by local adoptive parents he’s now estranged from. He used to coach and teach high school Phys Ed, until he was convicted of a sex offense whose details we learn late in the action. Now he works at Waffle House and goes to court-ordered SexAholics meetings. The first 15 minutes of the play show him preparing for his Tinder date while trying to get off the phone with Paul, his SA sponsor.
Paul (Keith Kupferer) is a rich, white, right-wing real-estate investor, formerly a porn and prostitute addict. He says he cares deeply about David (Babak Tafti)—calling in favors for him from his lawyer friend, letting him use this apartment—but he’s awfully pushy on the phone in a way that doesn’t align with David’s gentle earnestness. He clearly relishes being an enforcer of this SA program’s strict rules, which forbid all sex outside marriage, including masturbation.
David is divorced and intent on regaining visitation rights with his young son. Paul keeps reminding him he’s utterly beholden to him for legal “signoffs,” threatening him with utter ruin for the smallest infractions, including failure to send “bookend” texts before and after his upcoming date that confirm he hasn’t had sex. Tafti’s David is silkily candid, a clearly horny man pretending not to be. He has lied about inviting his date over because he’s in a bind: SA’s rules say he can’t yet every public place he might meet her is near a school and thus legally off-limits.
Despite this lie, we’re set up to wonder whether David really deserves the terrible public brand of deviant predator. He’s seriously likeable, openly mulling when, for instance—not whether—to tell Tally his story. Then, when she arrives, played by Jodi Balfour in platform heels and a steamy short blue skirt, we’re set up to wonder if she’s in danger. The question of whether David might be in danger only arises much later.
Balfour’s canny performance is the production’s linchpin. Tally proves even more of a liar than David, but she’s also anomalously earnest. Balfour plays her with disarming nonchalance and an air of intelligent competence, helpfully repairing a fallen curtain and killing a roach with her bare hand, for instance. She’s not wary of or puzzled by David, no matter how much he reveals about his past, and she’s completely up front about wanting sex.
Tally grew up in the town and is back temporarily to help her dad move. She has her own checkered past, but it doesn’t explain how strangely unfazed she is by his story. The suspense and fascination of the whole 90-minute play largely turn on her unexplained insouciance mixed with bright sincerity.
Why doesn’t she care that David was caught sexting with a 17-year-old, that he barely avoided prison, and wore an ankle bracelet until recently? She’s super resentful about the exploitation she has endured over the years—as an unpaid corporate intern, for instance, and a B-movie actress, yet we don’t quickly see how that connects to David or Paul (who enters later). Nor do we know why she doesn’t disclose right away that she and David went to middle school together. In time we learn that, despite her ample cynicism (“We’ve ALL been a sexual creep in our life”), she is preternaturally perceptive about the difference between true and false accusations against men, and those perceptions become pivotal to the shocker ending.
Lowcountry is the third play in a trilogy whose others I haven’t seen (they weren’t done by the Atlantic), and it contains a few mystifying moments that suggest it doesn’t entirely stand alone. A quick Google search, for instance, reveals that Tally’s baffling, red-herring remark that her mother, who died of cancer when she was 12, was “killed” by Bill Clinton might be explained in the first play. Tally’s decidedly various radical sentiments don’t really gel into a coherent political position. Lowcountry is at its best in gradually unfolding Tally’s real-time decision, as a woman “ovulating really hard right now,” to trust, defend and ally herself with a convicted sex offender, at considerable risk to herself.
It will remind many theatergoers of Bruce Norris’s Downstate, a much-discussed play about post-prison pedophiles that was produced at Playwrights Horizons in 2022. Both plays contain finely observed expressions of sympathy with such men’s legitimate emotional needs and with the severe restrictions imposed on them by vindictive, draconian laws. The main difference is that Downstate is grimly tragic whereas Lowcountry is lightly comic—akin to a spicy rom-com until its melodramatic climax.
Rosebrock is lucky to have insightful and discriminating Jo Bonney at the helm for this show. Bonney knew just how to slow-build the amatory tension and modulate that heat to keep the big plot secrets hidden until the end. The result is a buoyant and subtle production of a swift, fun and sensuous play.
By Abby Rosebrock
Directed by Jo Bonney
Atlantic Theater
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