Review: DROWNER [RENWORD] at NextStop Theatre Company
World premier at NextStop Theatre in Herndon
By: Laurie Sara Oliver Feb. 04, 2026
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NextStop Theatre Company, in Herndon, is one of NoVa’s delightful strip mall theaters - an unexpected, small but packed black box sandwiched between an Ethiopian restaurant and a motorcycle dealership. This month, they are hosting the world premier of DROWNER [Renword], the latest work by Harlem-based playwright Nia Akilah Robinson.
DROWNER is a horror / comedy hybrid, which is an excellent choice for live theater that goes tragically underused. Likely because it’s daunting to write, perform, and produce. But DROWNER successfully balances the two genres’ competing demands. From the start, the show sets the tone with the usual pre-performance announcements done in haunted house style, complete with the evil laugh. Generally, the humor is the right amount of overdone, and the horror is well-executed. There are moments that will make you laugh and moments that will make you jump in your seat.
In fact, like today’s popular film style, DROWNER is made up entirely of discrete moments stacked on top of each other so that it almost feels like scrolling through TikTok, clip after clip after clip. The scary moment. The funny moment. The vulnerable moment. The bonding moment. The bravery moment. This rapid-fire approach can be effective, but it often comes at the expense of a broader arc.
The story of DROWNER is logical enough. Two students at Columbia accept a summer job helping long-retired Professor Renword catalog old documentary film archives. Things are funky from the start, but the situation quickly deteriorates into chaos. The horror escalates as we learn about both girls’ home lives in parallel. Through their conversations with each other, we hear about the challenges they face that believably led them to accept this odd arrangement in the first place.
The dialogue is natural and often sounds like two friends actually talking to each other. There’s only the occasional monologue - another way the show feels modern and digestible. Each exchange and each scene is coherent in itself. It’s up to the audience to piece them together and decide what to take away. That said, try as this reviewer might, it was difficult to identify a broader takeaway to tie these vignettes together.
Most of the scenes deal with different aspects of the Black experience. These are well-captured and well-presented on their own. Yet at the end of the play, no character has really learned anything, changed, or grown. The audience has seen snapshots of their lives, gotten to know who they are, even felt what they felt, but it was not clear what the point of it all was. It’s always interesting to meet someone new, even a fictional character. But when I do, I hope to understand not only where they came from but where they are going. In this production, I felt cheated of the second part.
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