Hub Theatre Co presents “The Understudy.”
Presented by The Hub Theatre Company of Boston
Written by Theresa Rebeck
Director – Paula Plum
Choreographer – Kiki Samko
Cast – Lauren Elias, Cristhain Mancinas-Garcia, Kevin Paquette
July 19 – August 2, 2025
Pay-What-You-Can Admission
Club Café
209 Columbus Ave.
Boston, MA 02116
Critique by Craig Idlebrook
BOSTON — Those who make the theatre their profession love to write about theatre as a profession. It’s an occupational hazard that audiences enjoy.
Playwright and author Theresa Rebeck is perhaps best known for penning the television show Smash, which premiered in 2012. The show followed the messy development process for a new musical and became something of a cult favorite during its two-season run. The play The Understudy, which Rebeck published in 2010, can feel a bit like a quiet prequel to Smash. The two works share themes about the push and pull between wanting to make great art and wanting to make it big.
Unfortunately, Smash and The Understudy also share a fatal flaw of unevenness that muddles the action. While the Hub Theatre Company of Boston’s production of The Understudy mines the script for good moments of comedy, the production can’t rise above this limitation of the source material.
In The Understudy, stage manager Roxanne (Lauren Elias) is holding a walkthrough for a newly hired understudy of a Broadway production. The production has been a somewhat successful run of a rediscovered work of Franz Kafka. The understudy hired happens to be Roxanne’s ex-fiancée, Harry (Kevin Paquette), a misanthropic struggling actor who rejects the mainstream art that rejected him first. Harry has disdain for his scene partner, Jake (Cristhian Mancinas-García), who has found success as a leading man in dumbed-down action films. Jake may be successful, but he wonders if he is just a hack. We watch these three disparate characters bubble with the pressure of their circumstances during a rehearsal where almost everything goes wrong.
The script feels too realistic in its depiction of a disjointed rehearsal, especially as Roxanne tries to coax sound and set cues from an offstage stage technician who is clearly not all there. Too often, the action is derailed by the wrong sound cue. Wrong cues can be slapstick gold if done right, but here it drags the show. Anyone who has sat through an endless Saturday cue-to-cue run through knows that such a process can sap one’s will to live, much less one’s will to make art.
The script sets another trap for the audience by centering it on a (made-up) play by Kafka. Many theatregoers know just enough about Kafka to know he writes some weird stuff where people find themselves stuck in absurd circumstances. A theatre production can be a perfect backdrop for such a theme, especially as many of us have had the nightmare of showing up to perform or present something without knowing what that something is. However, this script doesn’t fully commit to being Kafkaesque in its tone, and that left me confused. It was the equivalent to having a gun onstage that never goes off.
Each member of the cast is strong, and each earns some great moments on stage to explore the mess of their characters’ lives. However, the pace of the back-and-forth dialogue too often felt sluggish, and the three characters often seemed to be talking past each other. This made some of the script’s moments of connection feel unearned.
In the end, I sympathized with each character but was grateful when they collectively threw in the towel and put an end to the rehearsal.
