In the aftermath of a life-altering event, Pre-Existing Condition explores the challenges, shared community and everyday indignities of learning to move forward. The production will star, in the rotating role of “A,” Emmy Award® winner Tatiana Maslany (Orphan Black), Tony Award® nominee Maria Dizzia (In the Next Room), Tavi Gevinson (“American Horror Story”), Tony Award ® winner Deirdre O’Connell (Dana H.) and Julia Chan (Uncle Vanya) in select performances. Ms. Maslany will be the first “A,” beginning on June 7.
Maslany is heartbreaking at the center of Ireland’s story; you can see her body, sometimes tensely twisted and sometimes crumpled in dull exhaustion, working through a poison it’s trying to expel. Whatever Dizzia, Chan, O’Connell, and Gevinson bring to the role, there’s a sense that they’ll be bolstered by Maslany’s performance, and that she in turn is drawing strength from the knowledge that they’re right behind her. “You have some nice friends,” Connors’s D tells A at one point. Perhaps that’s what you do with this: Find those friends, take their hands, tell your story.
The canny Pre-Existing Condition result is that Ireland as much as anything else presents a clever satirical screed on how we communicate nowadays. She hears how often we’ve integrated psychological jargon into our discourse and just as often blithely — though, we think, seriously — pass it along as meaningful observation. She’s taken in how regularly we satisfy ourselves with what we have to say, assuming it has more value than it does. The outcome, she implies — maybe as regularly as not — is less broad satisfaction than self-satisfaction.
| 2024 | Off-Broadway |
Off-Broadway Premiere Off-Broadway |
| Year | Ceremony | Category | Nominee |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | Drama Desk Awards | Outstanding Featured Performance in a Play | Greg Keller |
| 2025 | Outer Critics Circle Awards | John Gassner Award (new American play preferably by a new playwright) | Marin Ireland |
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