“What Remains,” which opened Thursday at Thistle Rep, is the best new play I’ve seen this season at a house under 150 seats, and it’s not particularly close.
Adaeze Okonkwo’s third play is doing something formally ambitious that I want to name precisely before it gets flattened into “a family drama about inheritance,” which is what the press materials want you to call it. The play runs 100 minutes without intermission, and its structure is recursive: the same contested reading of a will is staged three times, each pass revealing a different layer of the family’s epistemic distortions — what each character knows, what they’ve chosen not to know, and what they’ve actively buried. Okonkwo is building dramatic irony through accumulation rather than revelation. The audience knows more than any single character by the third pass, which turns the final confrontation scene into something much stranger than a family argument. It becomes an accounting.
This is in direct conversation with Caryl Churchill’s structural experiments — specifically the overlapping speech of “Top Girls” and the temporal disruptions of “Fen” — but Okonkwo isn’t doing Churchill pastiche. She’s doing what Churchill was doing: using formal distortion to make visible what naturalistic staging buries. The grammar is her own. Where Churchill uses interruption and simultaneity, Okonkwo uses repetition and delay — the same words, different meanings, because the context surrounding them has shifted.
Nadia Voss plays Sola, the eldest daughter who has managed the estate, and she is doing something technically demanding: the character’s performance of competence has to read as performed in the first pass and genuine in the second, without Voss tipping her hand. She doesn’t. Theo Olubunmi as the youngest sibling carries the play’s moral center without making it sentimental, which is a harder job than it looks. Claudette Marsh, as the family’s estate attorney who has been inside this dynamic for thirty years, gives the quietest and most careful performance in the production. It is the one I keep thinking about.
Serena Park’s direction is clean where it needs to be and deliberately static in the repeated scenes — the blocking is nearly identical across all three passes, which forces the textual differences to do their full work. That’s a structural decision that respects Okonkwo’s formal intent, and it’s the right one.
The limitation, and it is one: the third pass runs approximately ten minutes longer than it should. Okonkwo knows exactly when the argument has reached its structural conclusion — the moment lands — and then the play keeps going. There is a final monologue from Voss’s character that gives us information the audience has already assembled. It doesn’t ruin the play. It does undercut the formal confidence that had been operating at a high level for the previous eighty minutes. I watched the audience settle back in their seats when it should have been sitting them up.
“What Remains” is at Thistle Rep through August 2nd, and if you want to see what a playwright with genuine structural ambition looks like at mid-career — still testing the form, still finding what it can hold — this is the show to see.
