The Minutes
Opening Night: April 17, 2022
Theater: Studio 54
Website: theminutesbroadway.com
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts and Tony-winning director Anna D. Shapiro return to Broadway with The Minutes, together for the first time since their Tony-winning sensation August: Osage County. The record breaking hit production from Steppenwolf Theatre takes a look at the inner-workings of a city council meeting in the small town of Big Cherry—and the hypocrisy, greed, and ambition that follow. This powerful, resonant, and funny portrayal of democracy in action proves that everything you know can change—it’s just a matter of minutes. After all, the smallest towns keep the biggest secrets.
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April 17, 2022
Yet Letts, a master of the American Macabre, makes something quite different of these middling workplace comedy ingredients: not a “Parks and Recreation,” nor even a “Miles for Mary,” but a deeply troubling play about history and horror.
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April 17, 2022
Even so, “The Minutes” doesn’t trade in shocking secrets or revelations. It exposes the systems of delusion that blind people to truths buried in plain sight. It’s devilishly funny until it’s not. It is thrilling and essential theater that interrogates the present by laying bare how history is written. And it’s among the best new plays on Broadway in years.
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April 17, 2022
Tracy Letts’ The Minutes would be one of the most thrilling new plays on Broadway this season even if recent real-life events hadn’t made it seem as uncanny as it is funny and, ultimately, disarming. The Minutes – there are a brisk 90 of them in all – begins as one thing and ends up quite another, and every step along the way is so finely rendered that we’re too busy savoring the moment to see what’s waiting just ahead.
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April 17, 2022
He wants to impart its horror. This tonal shift requires a huge stylistic swing, and The Minutes — so fine and deft and wicked for its first sixty minutes — can’t take it.
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April 17, 2022
The script has the potential to be painfully relevant, but Letts stops short of fully interrogating each character’s response.
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April 17, 2022
The Minutes is a piece as mysterious as it is ferociously entertaining. Among the play’s many pleasures is the humor it finds in the tedium of politics. Letts deftly captures the absurdity, confusion, and passive aggression that animates these gatherings.
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For a play written some five years ago, the work retains remarkable currency. It’s not as if American democracy suddenly is feeling more secure. And it’s another example of powerful Steppenwolf acting, not the showcase “August: Osage County” afforded, but a symphony of provincial low-burn tyranny, nonetheless. You might be put in mind of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Or “Stranger Things.” Or a grown up version of “Lord of the Flies.”
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April 17, 2022
I suspect that Letts’s heart is in the right place, and that he is honestly interested in telling an important truth from a Broadway stage: This is a country built on top of conquered lands formerly occupied by the victims of bloodiest and most sustained genocide in recorded history. Nothing can ever undo that, and replacing the Pledge of Allegiance with a land acknowledgement is a poor form of reparations. Someday, someone will be able to tell that story on a New York stage without it degenerating into self-flagellating, quasi-religious ceremony.
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April 17, 2022
One thing is clear, if there is one play you choose to see on Broadway this season, have it be The Minutes.
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April 17, 2022
The Minutes is a brilliantly sugared, very bitter pill. At first playwright and star Tracy Letts, and his on-fire company of actors, seem to take us to comedic Parks and Recreation territory. The play, which opens on Broadway on Sunday night (Studio 54, booking to July 24), is centered around a town hall council meeting in Big Cherry, Pennsylvania, with a gallery of the strange, eccentric, and clueless blowhards you might expect flexing their jaded, policy-shaping muscles.
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