The Visitors

The Visitors gathers four adult siblings in one apartment because the eldest of them has a request she cannot make over the phone. Joanna is in her mid-thirties, she wants to become a parent, and what she needs from her family is not money.

The others arrive with their histories intact: old alliances, old grievances, and the particular shorthand of people who grew up in the same house and have since become strangers who share a surname. Over the course of the visit the request has to be spoken aloud, considered and answered, and the play watches what that does to four people who love each other imperfectly. Bryna Turner writes comedy that turns without warning into something much harder to sit through.

This is a new play receiving its first production, and it belongs to a familiar tradition — siblings, one room, one unavoidable conversation — handled with a contemporary ear for how families actually speak to each other. It suits audiences who like small, sharply written domestic drama, and it works best live, where a handful of people in a room can hold a silence for exactly as long as they need to.