Review: CROSSWORDS at AS220 Blackbox
The production runs through November 9th.
By: Jay Pateakos Nov. 10, 2025
How well do we know really know our significant other? Really really know them?
Those doubts take center stage in this wonderful World Premiere Production of A.J. Rose's Crosswords at AS220's Black Box Theater.
Long-time married couple Val and Gene seem immersed in their typical lives, loving crossword puzzles, helping each other to solve them, until they happen upon a serial killer's ciphered note inside their morning paper that begins to slowly turn their life upside down.
Set in the summer of 1969 in California, the couple begins working on this big mystery to try and solve before another murder takes place from the killer Gemini, as the couple begin to realize there's way more mysteries in their own life that they have ignored for years, all that come to a head as they toss newspapers around trying to solve the cipher. Where has Gene been going each night when he tells his wife he's with a friend and she finds out his friend has been busy elsewhere? Why is Val so into talking to her friends more than to her husband?
When Gene argues with Val about her friends and the gossip they share, Val counters with "just because you bury your thoughts in books doesn't mean everyone is that way," and suddenly their quiet life begins to unravel. When Gene gets caught in a series of lies, some of them the audience never sees coming, Val concedes "we pretend everything is the same, we both do, and it's not. It's not."
Playwright A.J. Rose noted that the idea for the play came when she listened to a Podcast on the Zodiac killer, who terrorized San Francisco in the late 1960's and 1970's and taunted the police and reporters with ciphers in the San Francisco Chronicle. Rose was fascinated with the story of the married couple who helped solve the first cipher. Rose said she loved the idea of the couple working on the cipher but what if it was at the cost of their own problems in their relationship that they've ignored for years? And that is the crux of Crosswords. Is the True Crime phenomenon really all of us avoiding our own problems by focusing on others problems? Director Megan Lummus talked of "A strong instinct, especially as we age, to want to desperately hold on to the past" and how we all seek comfort in the easy routes while ignoring the problems that are in front of our faces. And at what cost? You're about to find out!
Katherine McCrackin plays an incredible Val, a doting housewife whose cozy life begins to unravel as the couple desperately attempts to solve the cipher while her husband Gene, played wonderfully by Beck Barsanti, whose dark side begins to emerge. Sandy Clancy and Brenden Bartlett wrap up the cast as radio voices.
Crosswords is a 60-minute (no intermission) shot of adrenalin and full of surprises that kept my wife and I talking the whole hour ride home. One thing we agreed on was that we could see Crosswords a few more times and find different pieces of the puzzle that we would try to make fit. I love original plays like this, not focused on a happy ending or really an ending at all but more an expose on lives that we realize weren't what we thought they were at all with secrets that will haunt the audience for weeks to come.
Reader Reviews
Rhode Island Awards - Live Stats
Best Musical - Top 3
1.
SWEENEY TODD (East End Theatre and Performing Arts)
12.8% of votes
2.
THE WIZARD OF OZ (Stadium Theatre)
12.7% of votes
3.
THE LITTLE MERMAID (Stadium Theatre)
10.9% of votes
Videos