Well, I’ll Let You Go ★★★★

Well, I’ll Let You Go doesn’t keep the promise made in its title because, well, it won’t seem to go. After a sold-out world premiere last summer at The Space at Irondale in Brooklyn, the show now arrives in Manhattan at Studio Seaview with almost its entire original cast intact.

Its return is welcome. Playwright Bubba Weiler has created a beautiful, life-affirming meditation on grief and the importance of community that is both thoughtful and humorous, and director Jack Serio succeeds in guiding the talented cast, led by the wonderful Quincy Tyler Bernstine, as they traverse that thin line between silly and serious. In short, the play feels like life, only more distilled.

And clean. The stage is mostly empty and begins with a charming — but not overly so — narrator (Matthew Maher, engaging) described in the script only as “a man”, who arrives to tell the audience what they should be envisioning. More than a riff on Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the production plays like a spiritual sequel to that Pulitzer-winning classic, what happens after the third act, once Emily Webb has accepted her passing and the brevity of life, when her loved ones must carry on without her.

In this play the recently deceased is a man named Marv, and we learn much about him as the Man describes the family room Marv shared with his widow, Maggie (Bernstine): “Another thing in the room is an old sectional couch. It should have been replaced years ago, but Marv and Maggie have an old dog and the old dog has stinky fur and loves to sit on this couch. If they got a new couch the dog would certainly stink it up so it’s been decided the couch will be replaced once the dog dies.”

After a full description of the family room, as well as the medium-sized Midwestern town where the house is located, Maggie receives a steady stream of visitors — family, neighbors, acquaintances — who each bring slightly different versions of her husband and his death. Their sometimes conflicting stories create a mystery as to who Marv really was, leaving Maggie to assemble a truth from a puzzle of fragments.

Weiler has structured the play as a series of quiet duologues, with Maggie always present but constantly shifting gears for her guests, who come to express their condolences but can’t help revealing a great deal about themselves in the process, most memorably family friend Wally (Will Dagger, terrific), a wayward soul who’s clearly depended on Marv and Maggie for support, and Joanie (Constance Shulman, transcendently human), the funeral planner who arrives with purple balloons and introduces herself with “Your husband’s dead. Is that right?”

Overall, the effect of the play’s structure is cumulative rather than explosive. Watching Maggie navigate her way through these revelations while trying to keep herself in balance is what drives the show, and for some audience members who want more Sturm und Drang in their dramas, it might not be enough. But for most, the play will serve as a reminder of the importance of community and everyone’s shared humanity, an idea that seems too lost at the present moment.