For a play so obsessed with the future, there’s something decidedly old-fashioned about This World of Tomorrow, the peculiar, anodyne drama by Tom Hanks and James Glossman that just opened at The Shed in Hudson Yards.
Hanks (in an embarrassingly bad hairpiece) stars as Bert Allenberry, a seemingly average Joe taking in the wonders of the 1939 New York World’s Fair. “Never has the world held a brighter promise of things to come. The present is but an instant between an Infinite Past and A Hurrying Future,” he reads from his trusty guidebook. He’s accompanied by Cyndee (Kerry Bishé), who’s less impressed and more concerned about taking off her very chic, extremely uncomfortable shoes.
On an adjacent bench, Carmen Perry (the sublime Kelli O’Hara) and her rambunctious niece, Virginia (Kayli Carter, who’s terrific but unconvincing as an 11 year old), stop for a moment and a polite chat.
[Read Frank Scheck’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Then, suddenly, we’re in the far-off future in Salina, Kansas. “Welcome back to 2089,” says M-Dash (the genial Ruben Santiago-Hudson). Turns out the 150-year time-traveling trip was something called a Chronometric Adventure, and it cost $225 million. “My birthday present for the boss,” shrugs Cyndee, who also shares an “Intimate Relations Contact” with Bert. It’s never clear what Bert, Cyndee, and M-Dash do, or where exactly they work. A tech company? It’s someplace where they can easily summon ELMA, the External Learning Machine Associate (Jamie Ann Romero)—sort of the their own personal Google, but smarter. And once they start talking about “Neura-Link network,” “Impulse coding,” and “Newtonian Sequencing,” we can’t help but wonder, how soon can we get back to 1939?
Bert wants to go back as well, officially to see more of the World’s Fair but clearly to see more of Carmen. We get a glimpse into her home life with her overprotective brother, Max (Jay O. Sanders, in an even worse hairpiece), sister-in-law, Sylvia (Romero), niece Virginia.
With each trip to 1939, Bert re-meets Carmen and gets to know more about her. Consequently, every return to 2089 becomes more and more frustrating. The past is so much more intriguing. Remember when New York had nearly a dozen newspapers? Bert gets them all delivered to his hotel room in one massive pile and reads all the names: The New York Daily Mirror, The New York World-Telegram, The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, The New York Sun, The New York Age, The Wall Street Journal, The Daily Worker, the Brooklyn Eagle, The Journal-American, and The Amsterdam News.
Hanks, who starred in Nora Ephron’s play Lucky Guy on Broadway in 2013, is very comfortable onstage. Still, we can’t shake the feeling that This World of Tomorrow would be better off as a movie. (Groundhog Day, Time and Again—you get the drift.) Or as a book, where the characters could get more attention. That’s where it all started: Hanks and Glossman based the play on three short stories from Hanks’ 2017 collection Uncommon Type. We leave the show wanting more of Bert and Carmen’s story…where do they go from here?
This World of Tomorrow opened Nov. 18, 2025, at The Shed and runs through Dec. 21. Tickets and information: theshed.org
