Theodora Vance’s “The Interval” is the most formally rigorous new play downtown has produced this season, and it just got more interesting. Soledad Rivas — four seasons as the lead of streaming series “Second Avenue,” a performance that was never less than controlled and often genuinely surprising — joins the cast at the Calloway Theatre beginning July 14, taking over the role of Marta from Delia Worthington, who is departing after a prior commitment.
The casting announcement is news, but so is the play itself, which opened in late May to reviews that ranged from perplexed to ecstatic — which is usually the right range for something worth paying attention to. Vance has built “The Interval” around a formal conceit that takes a minute to land and then becomes impossible to ignore: the script treats silence as architecture. Stage directions specify not pauses but durations — three seconds, seven seconds, eleven — with the precision of a composer marking rests. It situates Vance squarely in the Pinter tradition, but what she’s doing with that inheritance is distinctly her own. Where Pinter’s silences are menace, Vance’s are accumulation. The pauses in “The Interval” are where the grief lives, and they compound.
The play follows three adult siblings — Marta, Roman, and Denise — gathered at their mother’s apartment for a purpose the text refuses to name for the better part of the first act. What they’re doing there, it turns out, is waiting for the moment when they agree to let her go. That setup could easily tip into the kind of domestic naturalism that loses the formal edge entirely. Director Cassius Park does not make that mistake. The design is spare in a way that keeps attention exactly where Vance wants it: on the line breaks, on the silences, on the moments when the siblings speak simultaneously and the words overlap without resolving.
Worthington has been doing something technically demanding in the role of Marta — tracking the character’s emotional state almost entirely in register, staying surface-controlled while the pauses do the heavy lifting — and Rivas, whose television work has always shown more technique than the material usually required of her, seems like someone built for exactly that kind of restraint. I am watching this transition with real interest and some caution, because “The Interval” is finely tuned and a new performer at its center changes the temperature of every scene she’s in.
The honest limitation is the third act. Vance has found a grammar for the first two acts that feels genuinely new, and then the third act arrives and explains itself. There is a monologue for Roman — the brother, played with excellent economy by Adisa Njoku — that tells the audience what the silences have already shown them. It is the one moment where Vance doesn’t trust her own form, and it lands with the specific thud of a playwright who has written something precise and then panicked at the last moment. It doesn’t ruin the play. It does make it slightly less than what it could be, and I’m saying that clearly because the rest of it is good enough that the compromise is more frustrating than it would be in weaker work.
“The Interval” — Rivas addition and all — is worth your Wednesday night, because Vance has found a structural language for grief that I haven’t seen before, and that’s the only reason I will ever drag anyone to a 70-seat house on a folding chair and make them deal with it.
