THEATRE REVIEW

JANUARY 2026 | Volume 259

 

Aaron Bushkowsky’s new play can be described as a black comedy that asks existential questions about living and dying. I’m okay with that. But I have to be up front here. I have a hard time with people, onstage or off, kvetching about getting older. Yeah, it’s tough. Body parts break down, you get sick, your friends die. Some of that can be genuinely funny; some of it devastating. But let’s avoid the clichés, people, of which there are many.

Bushkowsky has a good comic eye (“Old people who hold hands look like they’re just doing it for balance”) and a sharp intellect. Elements of this play poke at important questions about mortality. But The Replacement Wifedrifts off into the lamentably predictable at times.And Johnna Wright’s United Players/Solo Collective premiere production doesn’t always manage to keep it real.

Ben (Bill Dow) and Jackie (Miriam Smith) are an older married couple without kids. He’s a college professor, near retirement, who teaches Greek myth and philosophy. She has stage four cancer. Jackie worries about leaving Ben alone. He obviously has no life skills. So she recruits her friend Rachel (Kathryn Stewart) to take care of him. When Jackie goes to Mexico to try an experimental cure, Rachel moves in with Ben.

Ben raises Big Issues with his students: “How did you get here?” He quotes Nietzsche a lot, and uses Homer to illustrate the point that “death makes life precious.” But he’s intellectually shallow and emotionally stunted, while Jackie, facing death, genuinely questions her life: “Why did I fritter away my time? Where was the magic?” Partly with the help of painkilling drugs, Jackie finds a calm, an equilibrium, and maybe sees in Ben, and Rachel, too, where some of the magic of her life drained away. Smith takes us on Jackie’s journey with quiet skill.

Although Stewart plays her much too archly at the start, Rachel has some good lines (“My makeup costs more than my food”). But her and Ben’s relationship is sitcom silly. When she moves in to take care of him, she tells him that she doesn’t cook, clean or shop for groceries. “But I can’t learn new things,” whines Ben, the old intellectual dog hopeless at new tricks. I liked Dow’s performance a lot but the character put me off.

The most interesting figures besides Jackie are Ben’s old friend Glenn (Alvin Sanders) and Suzi (Ella Wood), a young woman undergoing experimental chemo in Mexico with Jackie. Glenn has experienced some unexplained life changes and now works as a greeter at someplace like Walmart, which the play suggests may be what the afterlife looks like. Glenn doesn’t always seem real or alive, and Sanders does a nice job of keeping his presence both banal and mysterious.

Suzi is the life force in the play—young, loud, funny and manically energetic, even in her illness. But Wood plays her too far over the top until the end, when you can see how much skill this young actress actually has.

For an ambitious new play in its first production, I know I’m giving The Replacement Wife a bumpy ride here. But I’m in the demographic this play is about. I want it to tell me something about life and death that I can use when it’s my turn to get replaced.

 

 

 

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