MERCURY to Have Off-Broadway Return at The Players Theatre
Mercury is written by award-winning playwright Jayson McDonald and directed by acclaimed director Lil Malinich.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Feb. 18, 2026
Verve Productions will present Mercury at The Players Theatre as part of their Spring 2026 Artists-in-Residence season. The play first premiered Off-Broadway at Theatre Row in December 2024.
This spring, as the Mercury rises in the middle of a summer heat wave, a trio of women play a game of whodunit – each a key figure in a murder that has happened, or will happen, or is happening right now.
Written by award-winning playwright Jayson McDonald and directed by acclaimed director Lil Malinich, Mercury is an absurdist exploration of identity and desire in a world where boundaries of time blur, exposing the instability of fact, memory, and truth. Names change, details differ, locales vary, but the event remains fixed: someone has been murdered. A crime of opportunity or a crime of passion? It’s a tragedy which, through the telling of it, slowly transforms itself from event into urban legend.
The narrative is non-linear and each actor plays a variation of each character, illustrating the mutability of fact and giving the story an increasingly familiar but unknowable feeling, like a recurring dream.
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