Nadia Ferreira-Bloom’s The Interval, now in its world premiere at the Meridian Stage Loft, is the most formally serious new play I have seen downtown this summer. It almost earns that completely.
The play concerns two sisters — Marta, played by Solange Kwon-Petrie, and Dove, played by Adaeze Lindqvist — who have returned to their childhood home following their mother’s death to divide the objects and, less tractably, the history. That premise is well-worn. What is not well-worn is the architecture Ferreira-Bloom has built around it.
The play operates in what she calls, in a program note that is actually worth reading, “interrupted acts.” Each scene begins forty-five seconds before the previous one ended. The repetition is exact — same lines, same blocking — and then diverges. By the second act, as the overlaps accumulate, you start to understand that Marta and Dove are not arguing about their mother. They are arguing about which version of the scene actually occurred. The form is not decorative here. It is the argument: that grief does not progress but loops, that a family history is not a sequence of events but a set of competing edits of the same event. Ferreira-Bloom has found a structural correlate for that and built a play inside it.
The lineage is clear. This is work that descends from Pinter — the architecture of what goes unsaid, the pressure of the off-topic exchange — and sits alongside Annie Baker in its patience with domestic register. But Ferreira-Bloom is doing something Baker doesn’t do: she makes the formal machinery visible, nearly diagrammatic. Baker trusts the pause to operate subliminally. Ferreira-Bloom makes the repetition structural and legible. I find this the bolder move, and through the first two acts, I find it almost entirely rewarded.
Where it isn’t rewarded: the third act. Ferreira-Bloom introduces a new temporal layer — scenes from the sisters’ adolescence, rendered in narration rather than enactment — and in doing so steps outside the formal logic she has spent ninety minutes constructing. The interruption structure depends on present-tense density and the live collision of two accounts. The moment the play retreats into narrated memory it loses the specific pressure the repetitions were generating. The emotional material in act three is not the problem. The form is the problem. She breaks her own grammar at exactly the moment the grammar would have been most useful.
Director Tamsin Oleah-Voss holds the production together across this break with more skill than the script gives her reason to. The pacing in acts one and two is exacting — each overlap timed to land at the precise point where dissonance becomes legible — and Lena Mwathi’s set, a kitchen that appears already partially dismantled on arrival, reinforces the temporal instability without spelling it out. This is a production that knows what it is mounting.
Kwon-Petrie’s Marta is built entirely in constraint, giving you nothing outside the scene’s specific demand, which means the moments when that constraint breaks carry exactly the weight they need to. Lindqvist’s Dove has less formally from the script — she is the sister who narrates in act three, who has to carry the emotional freight the structure can no longer hold — and she does it with more composure than the writing deserves. There is an imbalance in how Ferreira-Bloom has distributed the dramatic material between these two women, and it is the most visible consequence of the act three problem.
The broken third act is a real structural failure. It is still worth your time to see this play through to that failure, because what precedes it is a playwright working with genuine formal rigor on a problem about memory that American theater has usually handled impressionistically.
Ferreira-Bloom has a grammar. She should trust it.
