Theater Review: ‘Three Changes’

Dylan McDermott as Nate, Maura Tierney as Laurel, his wife, and Scott Cohen as Hal, his older and now destitute brother. (Joan Marcus)

NEW YORK—The need for family, the need to connect, and the need to belong—these elements are explored in the world premiere production of Nicky Silver’s “Three Changes.” It is a dark and unsettling look at marriage, estrangement, and violations of trust.

Laurel (Maura Tierney) and Nate (Dylan McDermott) are an outwardly happy married couple living on New York’s Upper West Side, with a nice, if totally antiseptic apartment. He works on Wall Street, she edits catalogs. It’s a home that has become a metaphor for their lives—sterile and passionless. Once very much in love, they began to drift apart after repeated attempts to have a child failed. Since then, they have slowly stopped talking and listening to one another, basically going through the motions of their marriage and accepting this as their lot in life.

[caption id=“attachment_74309” align=“alignright” width=“320” caption="Brian Smith as Gordon and Scott Cohen as Hal, guests who seem to take over their host