Blackout Songs Off-Broadway Reviews

Teague and Lee’s chemistry is electric and arrestingly physical, almost like watching a choreographed dance. Lee is particularly mesmerizing, and it’s difficult to keep your eyes off of her as she sweeps across the stage. When Her addresses the audience in the last scene, the rawness in Lee’s performance moved more than a few in my audience to tears.

Scott Pask’s minimal set design serves the abstract narrative well, while Stacey Derosier’s lighting and Brian Hickey’s sound design and music are integral to the proceedings. Blackout Songs proves a bit repetitive at times and probably would benefit from some paring of its 95-minute running time. But there’s no denying that it packs a powerful punch.

Blackout Songs also delivers moments of brightness. Lee is particularly magnetic, playing Her with a sharp blend of wit and vulnerability. The gaps between memories/scenes feel cavernous, though the physical transitions themselves are smart and sleek, thanks in large part to lighting design by Stacey DeRosier and staging by director Rory McGregor and movement consultant Sarah Parker.

In the authenticity, a deep love emerges that neither character may be willing to embrace. Part rom-com, part harbinger on the dangers of alcoholism, the intimacy of Blackout Songs brings an aching realism to the stage with imagination and creative staging.

While director Rory McGregor moves his cast nimbly around the wide wood-panel-lined stage that represents multiple locations in their on-again-off-again affair (designed by Scott Pask and lit by Stacey Derosier), he doesn’t bring much clarity to White’s challenging nonlinear script — which wallows in narrative confusion as it plunges both the audience and the characters into repeated bouts of alcoholic amnesia between some harrowing depictions of addiction at its worst.