If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a sex offender, Lowcountry might possibly be the play for you. I’m not trying to be facetious but this is definitely an odd choice for a protagonist; and Abby Rosebrock’s (mostly) two-hander gets points for originality. But like its wacky characters, the play suffers from a bit of an identity problem. It’s a serious topic alright but tends to get carried away with confusing quirks and twists that don’t add up.
Set in the rural town of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, it begins with an extended phone call between David (Babak Tafti), the registered sex offender, in his low-rent studio apartment talking to the unseen Paul (Keith Kupferer), his sponsor, who’s supposed to help David navigate back to some semblance of normalcy after the – yet to be revealed – incident that upended his life. The call runs 19 pages in the script. It is too long and tedious, providing exposition that’s not all that clear. And it doesn’t help that the audio is sometimes garbled so we miss key information. It amounts to a very weak start to the play, and we end up losing attention, if not losing interest altogether.
We do learn that David is desperate to re-connect with his young son, Jacob; and Paul makes clear that as long as David follows the strict rules of his supervision, he can one day see his son again. But right now, he’s not permitted to even speak to Jacob; and any violation will trigger prison and termination of parental rights. Additionally, he’s not allowed to be alone with a woman inside his residence. And of course any sexual encounter is forbidden. But already David is breaking the rules after agreeing to a dinner date at his home with a woman he met on Tinder. He lies to Paul about it, telling him that they plan to meet in a park.
The action picks up when the date arrives. Tally is an odd duck and (perhaps too neatly) she turns out to be a sex addict, looking for action. And so, of course there’s conflict as temptation rears its head. The two go back and forth confessing some dark secrets. David reveals that he can’t cry, though, predictably, he will be crying before play’s end.
He’s got reason to cry as he’s basically forced to wear a Scarlet Letter everywhere he goes and his life is essentially ruined. But the more we learn about the two of them, it seems pretty clear that Tally is far more dysfunctional than David. And if you had to identify one of them as a sexual predator, she would win that race hands down. The only difference, of course, is that David broke the law with a teenage girl and he’s forced to pay a steep price for the crime.
The performances are all first rate. Paul makes a brief but pivotal appearance at play’s end and Kupferer, a veteran Chicago actor, fills the part with appropriate smug southern entitlement. Rosebrock has him throw in some racist remarks, citing David’s dark-skinned ethnicity. He tells David, who is foreign born, he needs to play up his immigrant story “but don’t get a tan.” And in a nod to current events, David doesn’t want to be called an immigrant because he fears “I’ll get my ass thrown in a van – end up in a camp, in El Salvador.”
As David, Tafti delivers a compelling portrait of a fairly decent guy who made a fatal mistake that has cost him dearly. Tally complicates his life in a very big way, and he’s forced to react to her bizarre impulses which keep him on edge and lead him down a destructive path.
Balfour, best known for her roles in Ted Lasso and For All Mankind, is a wonderfully intuitive actor. As written, Tally is a curious conundrum of a character. It’s a difficult role to pull off because she seems to be such a mess. Near the end of the night David remarks “You’ve been…extremely confusing this evening.” To Balfour’s credit, she plays Tally with enough intriguing gusto to keep us constantly guessing what she’s up to.
Veteran director Jo Bonney does her best maintaining our interest in this 90-minute production even when the writing veers off in tangents. And by the end, it takes a major detour into Martin McDonagh territory which Bonney manages well, though it seems thrown in for shock value.
The script indicates that Lowcountry is actually the third play in a trilogy, and that might explain the show’s incongruities. Maybe we need to see all three works to make sense of the last one. Even so, it’s hard to figure out what we’re supposed to learn from the play. Is it that we shouldn’t be so quick to judge sex offenders? Or that there are worse people more deserving of punishment who don’t get caught? No matter, the performances raise the bar enough on Lowcountry, making it worth a visit.
Lowcountry opened June 25, 2025 at the Linda Gross Theater and runs through July 13. Tickets and information: atlantictheater.org
