Written by Max Posner
Directed by David Cromer
World premiere

Ida Armstrong is broke, lonely, and fading fast. And she’s spending all of her children’s money, forcing her son to assume the unwanted role of The Treasurer: an arrangement that becomes untenable the more he questions his devotion to her. In this darkly funny, sharply intimate portrait, Max Posner chronicles the strained ties between a son and his aging mother, and the hell of a guilty conscience.

It’s tempting to want to distance yourself from the main character of Max Posner’s new play, The Treasurer. Referred to only as the Son, he’s a hardworking geologist, a loving husband, and a supportive father who has assembled the trappings of a normal, happy life. But, he assures the audience in his opening monologue, he’s going to hell. Why? Because he doesn’t love his mother, Ida Armstrong, a recent widow whose lifelong tendency to spend beyond her means he’s suddenly found himself in charge of reigning in. As the darkly comic, exacting work unfolds, showcasing David Cromer’s slick directing talents and Posner’s preternatural penchant for blending the absurd with the hyperreal, it becomes harder not to feel for both Son and mother and recognize the undeniable ways that time, distance, and complex, ancient traumas — Ida left the Son, then 13, and his father for a more exciting, lavish life with a journalist turned politician — affect our ability to communicate, connect and give love.   If it seems precocious that a twenty-something writer should tackle the pathological angst of the twilight years, consider also that the play is, in large part, autobiographical — about his father’ …Read more