Kingdom Come
Opening Night: November 2, 2016
Closing: December 18, 2016
Theater: Black Box Theatre at The Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre
Samantha is lonely and confined to her bed. Layne is shy and too afraid of the world to journey into it. But when these two thirtysomethings connect through an online dating site, they fall for each other fast and hard. What could go wrong? Considering that they’re both pretending to be someone else, the short answer is: everything. When people are free to project any version of themselves they wish, who knows where reality ends and fantasy begins? Our new, digital world is upended in Roundabout Underground’s latest world premiere, Kingdom Come, Jenny Rachel Weiner’s blisteringly funny and all-too-relatable comedy about what happens when the feelings are real, but the people are not.
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November 2, 2016
Two lonely women search for connection online, with unexpected results, in “Kingdom Come,” a low-key but likable new comedy-drama by Jenny Rachel Weiner that opened at the Roundabout Underground on Wednesday. Samantha (Carmen M. Herlihy) and Layne (Crystal Finn) both live in Carson City, Nev., although when they meet on an online dating site, they’ve changed most of the details of their lives. The naïve Layne works in an insurance office and has been goaded into online dating by her co-worker, the sharp and dryly funny Suz (Stephanie Styles). Naturally insecure about, well, just about everything, she decides to say that her name is Courtney and that she is a flight attendant, checking in from points exotic. She also posts someone else’s photo with her profile. But it’s Samantha — who is seriously overweight, rarely leaves her bed and requires a caretaker, Delores (Socorro Santiago) — who is actually practicing the greater deception. She alters her gender and claims to be a pastry chef named Dom, short for Dominick, living in Los Angeles — details she has swiped from the life of Delores’s son. (Why she chooses a male alter ego is an issue the play doesn’t explore: maybe just to be as different from her own unhappy self as possible.)
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