Ricardo Chavira, Anika Noni Rose, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Kayli Carter, Jeena Yi, Richard Thomas,  Marylouise Burke (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

The Balusters

By Marc Miller

I saw the title The Balusters and thought OK, this will be about Mr. and Mrs. Baluster. Wrong! Turns out a baluster is “any of the small posts that support the upper rail of a railing, as on a staircase,” as Webster has it. They’re of concern to architectural preservationists and hardly anybody else, and they’re the linchpin of The Balusters, the Manhattan Theatre Club’s smart and funny new comedy by David Lindsay-Abaire that could still be a bit smarter and funnier.

It’s very current, about issues that are lodged at the front of most of our cortexes these days: political correctness, generation gaps, progress vs. tradition, decision-making by committee. And it will resonate especially if ever you’ve served on a co-op board or a neighborhood association. If the latter, yours will probably resemble in many respects the Vernon Point Neighborhood Association, where our ten characters will usually be found hashing out conflicts and getting on one another’s nerves. Lindsay-Abaire describes Vernon Point only as “a tree-lined, landmarked enclave of an East Coast city,” but as it’s a neighborhood of elegant Victorians buttressed by poorer, more ethnic and crowded sections, let’s assume it’s something like New Haven.

This first of several meetings is being hosted by Kyra (Anika Noni Rose), new to Vernon Point and anxious to fit in and make a good impression. Fitting in shouldn’t be that difficult, given the diversity of the association: Elliot (Richard Thomas), the president, is the old guard, a neighborhood lifer dedicated, maybe too dedicated, to sustaining the environment he loved as a kid 60-odd years ago. Outwardly conciliatory and smiley, he’s no one to cross. Penny, played by Marylouise Burke with her customary delightfulness, is a spacey septuagenarian who’s usually a beat behind everyone else, but observant and cagey as well. Ruth (Margaret Colin), also in their age group, is pushy, acid-tongued, and armed with Lindsay-Abaire’s best lines. She loves riling Willow (Kayli Carter), a younger liberal who’s vegan and works for PETA. Melissa (Jeena Yi), the vice president, is a clever lawyer who likes a good fight. Brooks (Carl Clemons Hopkins), gay, married, Black, and very aware of how different that makes him from the rest of this crew, is affable but gossipy. Isaac (Ricardo Chavira) is salt-of-the-earth and proud of his ascent from Latino underclass to Vernon Point. And Alan (Michael Esper) wants to be a well-liked nice guy, but is aware that his straight-white-male status is going to curry resentment from some of his fellow members. Watching them all, with a wary eye: Luz (Maria-Christina Oliveras), once Elliot’s housekeeper and now Kyra’s, who knows where some of the Vernon Point bodies are buried.

Margaret Colin (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

So what about those balusters? A local family ordered an architecturally inappropriate bunch of them for their new front porch—worse, Elliot notes, from Home Depot. Most of the others would probably shrug this off; he won’t. That’s his cause, one among several. Melissa is incensed because someone’s throwing dog poop into her garbage. Alan is concerned over packages being stolen off people’s front steps (as happened to us in New Haven). Kyra is scouting properties to open a bookstore. And she wants stop signs at her corner, as cars are riskily speeding down the street to avoid a newly installed traffic light one block over. Elliot’s opposed to that, he thinks they’re unsightly and nontraditional, and there’s your main conflict.

Pretty prosaic issues, right? Lindsay-Abaire gets maximal impact from them by using them to point up the differences and resentments among the association members. Several of them, not unexpectedly, have secrets, and their unmasking will up the ante. Mini-dramas are unpacked cleverly, from Brooks’s domestic tribulations to the consequences of Penny’s eternal befuddlement to Elliot’s recurring cancer, and they fuel multiple resolutions, satisfyingly.

All the same, I found some aspects of The Balusters disappointing. Kenny Leon’s direction bristles with energy and smartly varies the rhythms. But when it’s nine people sitting and having a meeting while the housekeeper bustles in and out, there’s not a lot to stage. So we’re stuck with mostly stagnant blocking. Until, that is, an eleventh-hour flip-out from Elliot. Richard Thomas, good actor though he is, doesn’t make this moment convincing; nobody could. It comes out of nowhere, and had Lindsay-Abaire set it up with more signposts, it wouldn’t be so jarring.

Fine performances across the board, and a couple of standouts. Burke is so endearing that she receives entrance applause near the end, just for unexpectedly showing up. Rose, having to deliver a disproportionate amount of exposition, keeps Kyra interesting while doing so. And Colin, given a bounty of zingers, nails every one.

Derek McLane’s set exudes upward mobility, and Allen Lee Hughes’s lighting, aside from some unnecessary frippery during scene changes, is exemplary. Emilio Sosa’s costumes tell us a lot about the characters wearing them, and Dan Moses Schreier’s sound design (he also composed the music) ably evokes traffic and thunder. One touch by Leon, the too-neat crashing of thunder after every punchline during a storm, felt like a contrivance.

Michael Esper, Jeena Yi, Anika Noni Rose, Ricardo Chavira, Kayli Carter, Margaret Colin, Carl Clemons-Hopkins, Marylouise Burke, Richard Thomas (Photo: Jeremy Daniel)

The Balusters strongly resembles a couple of other recent plays, Tracy Letts’s The Minutes and Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, with its focus on civic issues, committee dysfunction, and what happens when clashing personalities and opinions grope uncertainly toward consensus. Lindsay-Abaire is similarly perceptive about group dynamics, and he’s certainly concocted an entertaining evening, one that’s likely to have an active afterlife in regional stagings. But aside from implying that changing demographics are affecting neighborhoods, and that serving on a neighborhood committee can be a gateway to hell, I didn’t find a lot on his mind.

The Balusters
At the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre
261 W. 47th St.
Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes, no intermission
Through May 24, 2026
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