By Emily Chackerian
To the trained eye of a romance lover, the protagonists of Blackout Songs are immediately recognizable. He’s a well-meaning-but-tortured student; she’s a party girl nursing a deep loneliness. He’s visibly unhealthy, and she tells us she comes “from a long line of survivors.” They’re puzzle pieces, unique but easy to slot together. Except Blackout Songs isn’t an easy romance, and the two do have one thing in common: they’re both alcoholics.
Now in its first U.S. production playing Off-Broadway, British playwright Joe White’s Blackout Songs unfolds through vignettes. The man and woman onstage—known only as ‘Him’ (Owen Teague) and ‘Her’ (Abbey Lee)—are so deep in their respective addictions that they’ve been left with only shards of memories, making it particularly hard to change their ways. As a result, both find themselves trapped in inescapable, Sisyphean cycles of addiction.
Hazy scene fragments make for an admirably dizzying way to tell a story, but it’s often disorienting. While the play structure mirrors the characters’ experiences, it may alienate or frustrate the audience trying to keep up. While I was left with great sympathy for the characters, watching two people struggling onstage for 100 minutes isn’t easy.
Smart staging swims upstream
Blackout Songs also delivers moments of brightness. Lee is particularly magnetic, playing Her with a sharp blend of wit and vulnerability. The gaps between memories/scenes feel cavernous, though the physical transitions themselves are smart and sleek, thanks in large part to lighting design by Stacey DeRosier and staging by director Rory McGregor and movement consultant Sarah Parker.
While Lee and the creative team do strong work to focus the play, it remains hard to find something to grab onto. In most cyclical story structures, characters find themselves back where they started, now older and wiser. Here, Him and Her are in a whirlpool, their pattern of mistakes swirling them down towards a tragic end. All you can do is hope the storm stops.
3 out of 5 stars
It wants better content.
Fast facts: ‘Blackout Songs’
In Blackout Songs, two alcoholics spiral toward rock bottom. The staging is sleek, but the play’s structure swirls.
- The Susan & Ronald Frankel Theater in The Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space
511 West 52nd Street, New York City - Running time: 100 minutes, no intermission
- Performances through February 28, 2026
