When Tally, a down-and-out actress and gig worker, returns to her rural hometown, she swipes right on a disgraced high-school teacher fresh out of an ankle bracelet. Lowcountry is a dark, twisted romcom about the psychic distress of looking for love in the digital age and the carceral state.
But ‘Lowcountry’ springs a few too many shock, or shock-adjacent, twists to be believable, among them the revelation that Tally and David knew each other as kids (he doesn’t recognize her), and Tally has sought him out for a confusion of reasons, including vestigial gratefulness at his kindness when her mother died when she was young, and she was ‘fat.’ The violent conclusion, in particular, seems more sensationalistic than persuasive. But ‘Lowcountry’ is at least novel in departing from the toxic-male-drama playbook: Here it is Tally, much more than the registered sex offender David, whose behavior proves most destructive.
All of it is solid context for the world that these two characters occupy, but most of it is told and not felt. As their mismatched date barrels onward, David starts to worry that Tally is making a show of her own empathy by being interested in him, and you start to worry that Rosebrock, as a playwright, is doing the same. It’s not that Tally and David’s charged cross-interrogation of each other isn’t a compelling situation, but Rosebrock keeps commenting on it from the outside—especially via Tally’s monologues that eddy like Substack posts—instead of enacting it.
| 2025 | Off-Broadway |
Atlantic Theater Company World Premiere Off-Broadway |
Videos