‘All Nighter’ Off Broadway Review: When College Ends With a Bang, Not a Whimper

I’m pretty sure this play was not written for people like me in mind. At the preview I attended, the audience was slightly more female and only slightly older than the teenagers who gather to see “Wicked” eight times a week at the Gershwin Theatre, only a couple of blocks from my apartment.

Natalie Margolin’s new play “All Nighter” opened Sunday at the nonprofit MCC, only one block from my apartment, which is renting out its Newman Mills Theater to a producing team led by actor Ben Platt. Impressive here is the marketing outreach performed by Arthouse, which filled this large Off Broadway venue with young theatergoers who are pretty much the age and sex of the five characters on stage. As the title of Margolin’s play would suggest, five coeds have gathered to perform an all-nighter before their final round of college exams. Needless to say, these seniors don’t study much. But they do drink, gossip, pop pills, eat hummus and carrot sticks and expose a lot of dark secrets about each other on the eve of their entering “the real world.”

“All Nighter” only appears to ramble all over the place. Big subjects like date rape and substance abuse aren’t overly dramatized, and in a nice switch, the color of a sports bra appears to cause far more consternation than one character’s affair with someone of her own sex.

Despite its diverse cast, “All Nighter” also avoids that trap of World War II movies that features a variety of ethnic types so that each of them can be stereotyped. Margolin knows how to construct a well-built play without making it look contrived. Intimations of missing pills and a stolen credit card make for big pay-offs that had the audience at MCC gasping out loud in the final moments of this 95-minute play.

These five women have a desperate need to belong, but rather than playing up the inherent pathos, Margolin often lampoons the empty slogans and rituals that construct that community.

Aptly directed by Jaki Bradley, the excellent cast includes Kristine Froseth, Kathryn Gallagher, Julia Lester, Havana Rose Liu and Alyah Chanelle Scott.

“All Nighter” runs through May 18.

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