Review: WAKEY, WAKEY. at Hyde Park Theatre

Originally premiering Off-Broadway in 2017 at Signature Theatre Company in New York under Will Eno’s own direction and starring Michael Emerson and January LaVoy, Wakey, Wakey finds an intimate home at Hyde Park Theatre in a stripped-down production directed by and starring Ken Webster alongside Rebecca Robinson.

The story itself is simple. A man named Guy (Webster) sits before the audience in what appears to be a hospital common room or hospice space. He talks directly to us. He jokes, rambles, loses his train of thought, asks philosophical questions, and shares scattered observations about life with the dry sarcasm of someone trying very hard to appear okay.

Halfway through the play, a strange feeling settled over me. There I was, laughing comfortably while the man onstage was forgetting how to hold onto the edges of his own life.

And I felt guilty. Insensitive. Suddenly aware of the fragility of life.

That hot second it takes to understand what Eno is doing, that delayed realization, becomes part of the play’s quiet brilliance. The audience spends much of the evening laughing at Guy’s awkward observations and self-deprecating humor before realizing they are essentially witnessing a farewell speech disguised as casual conversation.

Eno’s writing thrives in contradiction. The play is funny without being cheerful, philosophical without becoming pretentious, and deeply sad without drowning itself in grief. Eno’s voice feels warm, contemporary, and unmistakably American in its rhythm. Humor becomes survival here. Guy jokes because silence would force him to confront the truth sitting quietly beside him.

That balancing act demands an actor capable of carrying emotional weight without announcing it, and Webster delivers exactly that kind of performance.

Alone onstage for most of the production, Webster keeps the performance restrained and naturalistic. His Guy feels tired in a painfully familiar way, like someone trying to hold himself together through conversation alone. Rather than leaning into melodrama, Webster allows the character’s confusion, awkwardness, and vulnerability to surface gradually over the course of the play. By the final moments, the empathy arrives quietly.

Robinson’s Lisa provides a steady counterbalance to Guy’s increasingly fragmented thoughts. Warm and understated, she grounds the play without slipping into sentimentality.

One of the production’s most prevalent elements is its use of video projection (Lowell Bartholomee). Images of ordinary pleasures and fleeting moments drift across the stage like fragments of memory: sunlight, laughter, movement, small joys we barely notice while living through them. The effect quietly reinforces the play’s central idea that existence itself is fragile and miraculous, even in its most mundane details.

Under Webster’s direction, the realism of the piece remains intact. There is no attempt to inflate the material into something larger or more theatrical than it needs to be. The intimacy of Hyde Park Theatre works beautifully here, trapping the audience inside Guy’s unraveling thoughts with nowhere to emotionally hide.

What stayed with me after I left Wakey, Wakey was not sadness, though sadness certainly crept in at times. It was awareness. The uncomfortable recognition that life often slips by in fleeting moments until suddenly someone turns off the light and you realize you may not have lived at all.

Eno never offers a solution or a comforting thought. He simply gives us a dying man cracking jokes into the dark, hoping somebody hears him before the silence arrives.

Run time: Short of 60 minutes, no intermission.

Wakey, Wakey.

Written by Will Eno

Directed by Ken Webster

Now playing through June 13th, 2026

Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 PM

Hyde Park Theatre 

511 West 43rd Street

Austin, Texas 78751

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