Audible’s Minetta Lane Theater has a spacious, airy set, and the lighting design is beautiful, and subtle, in the way it can make actors seem suffused with golden light, or plunged into icy cold. There are large props placed on the stage, notably a massive, sturdy ladder, as well as two theater seats. Sepideh Moafi and Hugh Jackman, who star in monologues one and three in New Born, an evening of three vignettes by British playwright Ella Hickson, are playful and inventive with the set – there’s a moment where Sepideh hangs upside down from a theater seat, and Jackman finds many creative ways to pose with, on, or under the ladder.  (The lighting is by Japhy Weideman; the scenic design is by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones.) 

In the first monologue, Sepideh Moafi -- who many audience members will know from her role as Dr. Al-Hashimi on season two of The Pitt -- plays a bored, upper-middle-class mother who is not given a name. She’s a graphic designer who's designing a snail that goes on the bottom of a coffee mug, one of those completely fake jobs that we give to characters in scripts: interesting enough to describe, but not absorbing enough to distract from the narrative. She has a chance meeting with a massive, A-list celebrity, who's attracted to her real, un-styled, denim-jeans-wearing, down-to-earth-ness, and tries to seduce her. This briefly re-awakens her sexual identity, which has been smothered by the daily grind of motherhood. Her other main pleasure is mindlessly swiping through celebrity news, which is like the equally pointless cousin of doom-scrolling. One of the larger themes of her narrative is that our phones slowly separate us from reality, and the digital screens that are always 3 inches from our eyeballs become more real to us than our own flash-and-blood loved ones. To which I say, respectfully: duh. She has a self-critical, high-minded attitude toward her own obsessive phone use – she ruefully talks about “scrolling,” “clicking,” and “swiping” until we feel like we’re listening to a chapter of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. That we're all obsessed with our phones, and to our detriment, is not a new insight -- I’ve been ignoring my actual loved ones ever since they put all 57 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy on Amazon Prime back in 2014. 

Throughout Moafi’s monologue, the writing has the tone of a work of literary fiction – Hickson has the character describe things that don’t really need descriptions, and many moments have a kind of affected, heightened feel; it’s like walking through a mist of symbolism. At one point, when Moafi is in a hotel room where the celebrity is coming on to her, Hickson has her describe, in a detached way, the angles of hands and where they’re being placed, as if she was writing erotic fiction at a writerly remove. There’s a clash between the affect of the performer and the flat, creative-writing dialogue of the script: the character, as written, is disaffected, but Sepideh Moafi, on stage, is vibrant, funny and normal. When she suddenly narrates violent actions – first by throwing away an expensive gift from the celebrity, and later by smashing her iPhone on the ground in a symbolic return to reality – the moments feel theatrically shocking, but not really believable. Moafi projects sanity and warmth, not smashy-phone tendencies.

New Born’s second segment stars Marianna Gailus, a young & talented performer who made a name for herself in Vanya Off-Broadway in 2024. From the first line, we must now say goodbye to the pleasant, recognizable, contemporary world of Sepideh Moafi’s character: Gailus walks on stage and tells us, that “Me and my mawmuh always been workers," signifying that we are way back in time and way out West. Gailus plays Martha, a young girl from a poor family living in Sheraton, Wyoming, in the last days of the American West. Martha works as a waitress at a nearby saloon, where sweaty, dirty men drink glasses of whiskey and leer at her. They’re brash, violent ranch hands who like their liquor and say things like “shut up and pour!” Martha feels like a real person, but these guys could be stock characters in a Western: the background characters throughout this second monologue are a little bit cookie-cutter. (I recognize those same “shut up and pour!” guys, with the dirty, dusty faces and the tattered pants, from Deadwood, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, Tombstone…etc.)

In the vignette, a young Black boy, Jimmy, goes missing in Sheraton, and Martha is the only person in town who cares that he might have been taken and killed by a Klan member. There’s an odd  interlude with Martha’s boyfriend John, who kills a mother rattlesnake and her baby rattlesnakes, which feels like a statement about the death of innocence. (He then offers Martha that good, good snake meat. Don’t waste it!) But before Jimmy’s disappearance is solved, this Wyoming frontier drama abruptly takes a detour into what feels like Little House on the Prairie: Winter Carnival Edition. The seasons change in Martha’s life, snow begins to fall, and suddenly every character is talking about how it’s snowing, and how they want to go sledding in the snow. There is more sledding in this play than in Citizen Kane and Ethan Frome combined. Meanwhile, Martha’s desperate quest to get someone to care about Jimmy’s disappearance – and to deal with the town’s Klan presence, culminates in a truly bizarre plot development that feels like it belongs to a Stephen King story. I won’t spoil it, but it involves the sled.

Gailus is a strong and naturally funny performer, and she sells a lot of this material, which edges, and sometimes tips, into utter strangeness. Her naturalistic, poignant performance feels at odds with a script where lots of zany, outlandish things happen, albeit against a backdrop that feels almost cliche. The second vignette is set in a generic Western world, punctuated by bizarre, unbelievable incidents (snake murder; sled-based attack). In fact, all three monologues feature violent surprises that seem inorganic, whether it’s killing rattlesnakes, smashing iPhones or the fate that ultimately befalls Hugh Jackman’s character. 

In the third and final vignette, Hugh Jackman plays a tree trimmer. Wearing a woodsy, yet chic outfit, his character (also unnamed) takes us through his relationships with two different women, in a story spanning many years. He first falls in love with a woman who he meets while working on her trees. Their relationship feels easy and fun, they get married, and have a child together. But somehow, after their son is born, Jackman’s character isn’t attracted to his wife anymore. The vignette is about attraction – emotional and physical – and how and why it goes away, and the unfairness and yet implacable reality that we can’t get it back. “I couldn’t live in disunity with my body,” says Jackman’s character, who is not a callous prick, but a guy who's uncommonly self-aware about his own feelings and biological instincts.

Hugh Jackman is fantastic on stage. He’s completely charming, sincere, down-to-earth, and believable. I was somehow both fully aware of his megawatt celebrity status, while also completely convinced that he was his character, right down to the rugged calluses on his hands from trimming trees and the jaunty way he wore his utility belt. Lumberjack fantasies were probably being born, live, in that audience.

Jackman’s monologue is well written, and the observations about men, women, and relationships feel insightful and original. Reflecting on how his feeling for his son has complicated his relationship with his wife, Jackman’s character observes that, in a marriage with kids, “you’re both fully in love with someone who’s living in your house.” The character is wry and funny about the realities of fertility: “When you start trying to have a kid, you realize you have no f–king control over nature… You start thinking about other people’s fertility. You notice the amount of hair of the guy at the deli. He can probably knock up his wife with a look.” His character does something that’s rare for a performer: be honest about a very base, animalistic form of sexual desire, but have enough charm so that we forgive his puerile admissions. 

“You can’t live the rest of your life against your body,” says Jackman in a moment of resignation. That is one of the through-lines of New Born – we are biological beings, and we want to have sex with other people, and be with them, even if it’s bad for us. The needs of children, and the sacrifice that children entail, are a powerful bulwark against hedonistic sexual desire. New Born, in its most successful monologues, makes the point that parenthood is about having both feelings – heedless hedonism and selfless sacrifice – coexist in our bodies and minds at the same time.