Review: THE MERCY SEAT at St. Louis Actors’ Studio is a Taut Post 9/11 Drama Steeped in Intimate Realism

St. Louis Actors’ Studio opened their new season with The Mercy Seat, a play set on the morning of September 12, 2001. In the hours following the attacks on the World Trade Center, a stunned couple, Abby and Ben, discuss their flailing relationship while holed up in Abby’s downtown Manhattan co-op.

Abby is an executive at a downtown Manhattan firm. Her lover, Ben, is married with children. He is also one of her employees.

Instead of going into the office on 9/11, Ben stopped at Abby’s apartment on his way to work for early morning shenanigans. His life was spared as a result of his indiscretions. Ben sees this as an opportunity to betray his family, flee with Abby, and leave his family believing he died in the attacks on the Twin Towers.

Neil LaBute’s provocative The Mercy Seat is scintillating psychosexual drama. It poses questions beyond the selfishness of an extramarital affair. His script examines power dynamics, the devastating effects on a family, and the lengths a narcissistic person would go to in order to protect his secret. Their choices make neither Ben nor Abby particularly likable, but their conversation is steeped in intimate realism.

Director John Pierson has orchestrated a seductive and stimulating adult drama. He elicits illicit portrayals from Franklin Killian (Ben) and Kelly Schnider (Abby). Their captivating conversations, punctuated with moments of silence, are as spellbinding as watching an extended rally in a championship tennis match.

Set and lighting designer Patrick Huber constructed a cramped Manhattan apartment where Pierson’s action takes place. Huber’s realistic lighting design shifts as Abby and Ben turn the TV on and off. Pierson’s ambient sound design enhances his storytelling by establishes place and time with television audio and the exterior sound of emergency vehicles responding to the tragedy. Absent are the normal street noises that subsided during the recovery efforts in lower Manhattan.

Teresa Doggett’s costumes express the characters’ exasperation with each other and their exhaustion from the previous day’s events. Abby and Ben have the disheveled look of emotionally wracked people who have stayed up all night watching news coverage. As the play opens, Abby is returning to the apartment from running an early morning errand on September 12th. Her coat, pants legs, and boots are soot-stained from the dust and debris on the New York streets. That attention to detail is sheer brilliance in costume design.

The Mercy Seat is a voyeuristic look at less-than-stellar people who contemplate taking advantage of a dire situation for their own selfish motives. Director John Pierson tells a compelling but uncomfortable story of self-centered opportunism. Actors Franklin Killian and Kelly Schneider inhabit flawed, morally compromised characters whose train wreck decisions are so unfathomable that you just cannot look away.

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