I didn’t see N/A, the political two-hander by Mario Correa, when it ran at Lincon Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater in 2024, so when it showed up on WNET (Channel 13), the Public Broadcasting Service outlet in New York City, in May, I DVR’d it.
I finally got around to watching it a few nights ago, not planning to do more than see what it was all about, so to speak. Then I considered writing it up as I have done with many plays since I started Rick On Theater 17 years ago. I decided I’d give it a try. So. here goes.
At the top of the PBS broadcast, a voice-over explains that the play is
A behind-closed-doors conversation closely inspired by two larger-than-life public figures. Despite their clashing ideas about government, both hold deep convictions for progress in the future of the country.
Let’s get the book on N/A down for the record first. The intermissionless, 80-minute play had its world premiere on 23 June 2024 at Lincoln Center’s Off-Broadway house, the Newhouse Theater, after opening for previews on 14 March.
Though playing at a venue of the non-profit Lincoln Center Theater, the première of N/A wasn’t an LCT production. It was an independent, commercial rental of the Newhouse, produced by a team of outside backers assembled by veteran commercial theater producer Jeffrey Richards.
The limited performances of N/A, which were initially scheduled to end on 4 August, were extended through 1 September. The play closed after 96 regular and preview performances.
The telecast I watched aired on Sunday, 31 May 2026, as part of the Theater Close-Up series produced by The WNET Group. (Theater Close-Up isn’t a national PBS network program. It’s a localized, curated series produced specifically by WNET.)
Directed for the stage by Diane Paulus (the TV director was Donna Zaccaro), the production was recorded live on stage at its Lincoln Center home in August toward the end of its 2024 run, right before the production officially wrapped its performances.
Unlike many new plays that spend several years in multiple regional tryouts, academic workshops, or staged public readings, N/A was fast-tracked specifically to meet the political urgency of a major election year (the 2024 presidential rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump).
The traditional multi-year developmental pipeline for N/A was bypassed through the intervention of Richards, who has an extensive record of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows (among them, the current Maybe Happy Ending—6 Tonys, including Best Musical, and 6 Drama Desks, including Outstanding Musical—and last year’s Beetlejuice and Glengarry Glen Ross).
Upon reading Correa’s script, Richards realized that the play’s thematic tension was vital for the immediate cultural moment. So, instead of routing the play through a non-profit theater’s multi-season workshop system, Richards formed an independent, commercial producing coalition.
The team bypassed the standard developmental workshops by mounting a commercial production and renting the Newhouse Theater directly. This meant the play didn’t undergo the typical public “try-out” or laboratory phase associated with standard regional non-profit commissions.
Through this streamlined commercial process, the script went from an unproduced text directly into New York rehearsals, transitioning straight to its first public performance. It also attracted creatives like the Tony Award-winning director Diane Paulus (Best Direction of a Musical, Pippin, 2013) and actors Holland Taylor (who has a proven track record with political solo-shows like Ann, the 2013 Broadway monodrama about Texas governor Ann Richards) and Ana Villafañe (who won a Theatre World Award for her Outstanding Debut Performance as Gloria Estefan in the 2015 Broadway jukebox musical On Your Feet!).
Now, let’s look at the play itself (which I’ve largely been avoiding till now, you’ll have noticed). It got a fair amount of coverage when it made its way to Lincoln Center, but that was not only two years ago, but it was also a summertime run—and a limited run at that—so not everyone was paying attention.
In a nutshell, N/A is a generational debate between two unnamed congresswomen, “N,” the first female Speaker of the House, and “A,” the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Though their names are never used on stage—and the initials appear only in the program (or, in my case, in the credits at the end of the broadcast)—these figures are modeled explicitly on Nancy Pelosi (b. 1940), Democratic Congresswoman from California since 1987 and the 52nd speaker of the United States House of Representatives, serving from 2007 to 2011 and again from 2019 to 2023, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (b. 1989), since 2019, Democratic U.S. Representative from New York and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
(Just so everybody knows: I’m closer to Pelosi’s age—not quite seven years her junior—than to AOC’s—almost 43 years her senior. I’m not sure what significance that holds, though.)
Lead producer Richards moved the script to Off-Broadway production at an accelerated pace because he saw that it dovetailed with Real Politics in the field, the presidential election of 2024, and he wanted to catch the wave, but to an extent, that seems to have backfired a little. The presidential race was such an attention-grabber that most people, including avid theatergoers, were paying more heed, I think, to the real world than to an Off-Broadway play.
The night of the official première, 23 June 2024, was a Sunday, an unusual night to schedule an opening. But this wasn’t actually an opening in the traditional sense of the term. It was a gala event for high-profile political figures, media personalities, and theater elites who Richards hoped would start whispering, posting, and talking about the show.
The producers set a strict embargo on the press, however, telling all publications that their representatives (i.e., reviewers) may watch the show at designated press previews or the première night, but they can’t publish reviews until Thursday evening, 27 June.
(Because the public couldn’t read the reviews until 27 June, outlets like the New York Times or New York Theatre Guide labeled the 27th, the day the show “unveiled” itself to the world, not the 23rd, as N/A’s “opening.”)
What no one could have predicted, was that Thursday evening, 27 June 2024, was the night of the momentous presidential debate between the Democratic candidate and incumbent president, Joe Biden, and the Republican challenger and former president, Donald Trump—and Biden gave his disastrous performance that changed the presidential campaign.
This created a fascinating, accidental intersection of art and reality: the very night the play “officially” revealed its political commentary to the wider public was the exact same night the landscape of Real Politics completely shifted.
On the one hand, this occurrence enhanced the focus on the play (which was, of course, about a different political debate), but on the other, it probably distracted many potential theatergoers to focusing on the real-world politics that was far more consequential.
Playwright Mario Correa (b. 1969 in Chile) describes himself as a “political junkie,” so all this background and foreground focus on elections and campaigning, both by the play’s presenters and its potential audience, is in his wheelhouse.
Correa immigrated to the United States with his family at age six, growing up in Bethesda, Maryland, just north of Washington, D.C. (That’s Montgomery County. At the end of her life, my mother lived in Bethesda, and I grew up in Chevy Chase, the first town north of D.C., before Bethesda.) He spent his early career immersed in real-world government, working directly as a congressional aide during the late 1980s and 1990s.
At 17, he campaigned for House candidate Connie Morella, then running to represent Maryland’s 8th district (Montgomery County), setting him on a political path. The liberal Republican—Correa labeled her “a very progressive Republican” in a 2025 interview for Barrington Stage—was elected in 1986 and served from ’87 until 2003; Correa became her aide. This experience gave him a firsthand understanding of the inner workings, rules, and unspoken dynamics of the U.S. House of Representatives.
The Washington Post reported that Pelosi also took office as a congresswoman in 1987. Because there weren’t many women in the House, they became unlikely friends across party lines. When gerrymandering made it untenable for Morella to be reelected, she was defeated by a Democrat and left Congress.
Correa left Congress upon Morella’s defeat, but he became a congressional lobbyist for high-tech corporations. “I loved the Hill,” he confirmed in a July 2024 interview for the Theatre Development Fund, referring to Capitol Hill, “but I didn’t love the post-Hill lobbying world.” So, after a few more years, writing comedy at night, he “quit my day job.” That was 2005.
(Reporters, politicians, and government workers and staffers, like Correa, use “the Hill” and “Capitol Hill” metonymically to refer to the work of senators and representatives. I did this, too, habitually, when I was 15 and had a summer job in 1962 in the congressional office of New Hampshire Representative Chester Merrow [1906-74], also a liberal Republican, who was running, unsuccessfully as it turned out, for the senate. [I returned to prep school for my sophomore year before the September primary that cost Merrow his seat in Congress and his bid for the Senate nomination.] I picked up the usage from my longer-serving colleagues in Merrow’s office who guided me in learning the office routines.)
Correa left politics behind, he says, but admits it still pops up in his writing. (His Off-Broadway comedy Tail! Spin! [New York International Fringe Festival, 2012] is about political sex scandals.) He sees N/A as “kind of a love letter to Connie and everything I learned” working at the Capitol.
Of Pelosi and Ocasio-Cortez, as well as their avatars, Correa avers, “I’m really conscious of the fact that I admire these real-life women. I enjoy writing about them . . . .” He admonishes us, however, “This is not the biography of Nancy Pelosi or AOC.”
Because the playwright has such positive feelings about the actual congresswomen, however, there’s no mistaking who their fictional doppelgangers are—the initialese of the program and the absence of names on the stage notwithstanding. As Gillian Russo points out in her New York Theatre Guide notice, it’s “immediately obvious.”
(In point of fact, no names are spoken in the play—with the exception of Oscar Alberto Martínez and Angie Valeria, a would-be refugee and his infant daughter who drowned in the Rio Grande in 2019. Donald Trump, for instance, is referred to only as “that man” and a few more colorful descriptives.)
To be clear, N/A isn’t actually a documentary play, or even a “docudrama,” which allows for considerable fictionalization. Correa’s dialogue isn’t drawn from any documents or recordings. (Tail! Spin!, unlike N/A, is a verbatim documentary play. Correa compiled the script from the actual text messages, e-mails, and public statements of the politician-characters.)
In N/A, the words of “N” and “A,” though based on Correa’s interpretations of Pelosi’s and Ocasio-Cortez’s positions and statements, are composed by him. They’re his distillations of what he believes the women have said or might say.
(For an examination of documentary theater, see my article “Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama“ [9 October 2009], as well as later posts “‘On The Real: Documentary Theatre‘“ [15 September 2017, 18 September 2017, 21 September 2017, 24 September 2017, and 27 September 2017], and “Documentary and Investigative Theater“ [10 September 2025].)
Correa, the PBS voice-over explained, focused N/A’s text around the historical events that transpired between “2018, when the Democrats win the House [6 November] . . . to the 2022 midterms [8 November] when the Republicans take it back.”
(Actually, the first scene occurs the day after “A”’s historic upset primary election victory in the New York State primaries [26 June 2018]—which, in New York’s 14th district [Queens and the Bronx], essentially means she’ll almost certainly win the general election in November—and the play ends on 6 November 2025, when “N” announces to the House that she wouldn’t seek a leadership role in Democratic Caucus.)
As WaPo also reported, Correa said that as the play developed in rehearsals, “it became clear that [it] was less about the mechanics of legislation than he intended and more about two powerful women trying to figure each other out.”
But, as I’ve established, it isn’t a portrait of two real-life congresswomen whose politics and goals clashed. It’s a fictional debate that dramatizes the intergenerational clash of the political philosophies of an old-line centrist Democratic party leader and a brash insurgent from the left wing of the party. (Something we’re seeing a good deal of right now in the run-up to the midterm elections in several districts.)
And therein lies the problem I had with the play. So, let’s get into that.
First, let me state that I found the two performances powerful and engaging. In my estimation, there’s no way that either of these actresses didn’t feel what the characters were feeling, believe what the characters were saying.
I’ve seen Holland Taylor, who plays “N,” and she’s strong, even fierce, and sure of herself in the most convincing way. She’s the pragmatist, and David Barbour of Lighting & Sound America dubs her “the sternest of schoolmistresses.”
I hadn’t seen Ana Villafañe (“A”), but she measured up to her opponent surefootedly and steadfastly with all the assertiveness I could expect. In the Wall Street Journal, Charles Isherwood writes that she “put[s] cool but clear passion into her performance.” She’s the idealist.
Taylor, for reasons including one I’ll delve into some shortly, dominates as “N.” That “schoolmistress” analogy holds true as she educates “A” in the political process (part of N/A is a civics class) and the world at large. We get to see “N”’s self-confidence, intelligence, understanding, and wry humor at her every turn.
It helps a good deal that Taylor has made herself look very much like Pelosi, with the assistance of Myung Hee Cho’s costume, a hot-pink skirt-suit and high-heeled pumps. (With no specific credit given for N/A’s make-up, I presume that the costumer was responsible for that, too, as is traditional.) As several reviewers noted, Taylor did not try to mimic Pelosi’s distinctive voice—but, then “N” isn’t “Pelosi.”
Bringing ardent sincerity to “A”’s radical objectives, Villafañe demonstrates genuine frustration at the political realities she finds in the House and the Democratic Party. She captures “A”’s resolve, assertiveness, and rejection of compromise. It doesn’t hurt that Villafañe, in Cho’s black pantsuit and black flats (later heels), is virtually a double for AOC.
As long as I’ve touched on Cho’s costumes, let me say a word about her set design. I found it underwhelming—though that may be oddly appropriate for this production: a Lucite desk, three Lucite cubes for use as seats, and, prominently up center, a five-foot Lucite case containing a gavel.
On the desk, which is in “N”’s office, is a landline phone on which she does her cajoling and utzing. “A,” by contrast, is tethered to her cell, on which she livestreams to her “followers” almost continuously. That’s, of course, supposed to be emblematic of the generation gap on display here.
(One other prominent item in the set decoration is subtly significant: a small, silver bowl. It sits on “N”’s desk and is usually full of chocolate squares, which she offers to “A” in the first scene and it becomes a leitmotif. The squares are Ghirardelli chocolate, “N” tells “A.” What isn’t articulated is that the Ghirardelli Chocolate Company is inextricably associated with San Francisco, the heart of Nancy Pelosi’s congressional district. If ya know, ya know.)
Rhoda Feng of Observer suggests that the scenic design “encourages the notion of a diorama on loan from a museum”—and it does. (The gavel turns out to be the one “N” used the first time she called the House into session—and she says it will go to the Smithsonian museum “when I’m done with it. Which I’m not!”)
Diane Paulus directs the play with sharp assurance. Oh, some of the blocking is “stagey,” especially when Paulus has one actress speak to the other who’s behind her so that the speaker’s facing the audience, not the person she’s addressing.
The problem at which I hinted above, however, gets in the way, as N/A soon begins to seem like a string of mini-debates over the same issues. Johnny Oleksinski compares the dialogue to “a campaign robocall” on the New York Post and Feng labels them “off-puttingly vague.”
The New York Times reviewer, Jesse Green, asserts that the playwright “is unable to keep the back-and-forth political debate from falling into a rut.” In the play itself, “N” accuses “A” of speaking like “a metaphor shower” and “A” characterizes one of “N”’s pronouncements as “a bumper sticker.” To my ear, both women are right.
In my view, this happens because Correa doesn’t have a catalogue of Pelosi’s and AOC’s actual statements from which to compile his dialogue. He only has something like a punch list of topics and he ends up repeating himself—or has his characters doing so.
There’s a second problem with Correa’s portrayals of the antagonists, and it may have been generated by his personal feelings—not necessarily his political leanings—regarding the real-life characters. His prior acquaintanceship, however glancing, with Pelosi may account for the fact that he gives “N” most of the best—that is, funniest—lines in the play.
In his Vulture/New York magazine review, Jackson McHenry points out that “giving a character laugh lines is like handing them a weapon.” He goes on:
The playwright may intend to be evenhanded, but the humor tends to be the giveaway. It can make someone seem smarter, wiser, more relatable, even if they’re espousing ideas you don’t agree with.
Most of the play’s humor, McHenry observes, “tilt[s] solidly in N’s favor,” rendering “A” as something of a pill. I suspect that Correa didn’t intend to queer the pitch to “N”’s benefit—I believe he meant for us to witness equal combat—and I don’t really know that the writer was influenced by his long-ago encounters with Pelosi in Morella’s office, but the result is what it is, irrespective of the causes.
McHenry, however, seems to think that Correa leans in favor of “N”/Pelosi’s political philosophy. Nevertheless, he says something with which I agree:
If you, like me, are more inclined to sympathize with A than with N [which I tend to, even as I recognize that her agenda is probably impossible to enact], a play that keeps insisting that better things aren’t possible gets frustrating quickly. . . . N/A wears quickly as a drama. It’s boring watching one generation dunk repeatedly on another for 80 minutes.
“I wanted to write about a battle of ideas,” Correa wrote in the Playbill for N/A, “the philosophical and strategic disagreements that have placed two historical figures seemingly at odds, despite shared values and objectives.”
It turns out, though, that that’s not actually what came about—and it’s probably just as well. As the writer told the Washington Post, the play moved away from his intended focus on civics and focused more on the two women. As Times review-writer Green observes, “[P]lays, performed by real people, can’t help but be personal too.”
I’m not sure that’s an axiom, but it happened in this instance. The political wrangling, as I’ve asserted, gets enervating pretty quickly, especially if you listen to newscasts and talk shows. We’ve heard it all before—especially just now, in the preliminaries to the midterms when Pelosi-like centrist candidates are facing progressive opponents in the mold of AOC.
But as dynamic shifts from articulating politics to revealing the characters, the individualities, the actors inject humanity and draw this viewer’s attention. Now, this doesn’t enhance the drama, but it does make for more compelling theater. In the hands of less charismatic actors, this might not happen, but with Taylor and Villafañe, it works.
The press in 2024 was mixed, leaning more towards the “meh.” Of the reviews I read, probably the most negative was Oleksinski’s Post notice. His first words are: “Don’t come looking for juicy drama at ‘N/A’ . . .” and then he adds,
The behind-closed-doors scenes pitting the Speaker of the House against the upstart New York congresswoman are more like Disney’s Hall of Presidents—reverential and robotic—than brutal Capitol Hill.
The Post reviewer complains that “no moment is ever explosive. In fact,” he continues,
“N/A” is almost a light comedy. Playwright Mario Correa turns Pelosi into a Don Rickles who delivers mean zinger after mean zinger about the then-30-year-old rep of the Bronx and Queens as if she’s working the Catskills.
“There’s no critique, really,” Oleksinski writes, “or insight into these famous women beyond what we already know,” summing up with, “It’s a whole lotta duh.” His appraisal of the performances is: “Taylor and Villafañe are ideally cast in less-than-ideal circumstances.”
In the Times, Green declares,
The play’s ideas and ideals are fine, and modestly if repetitively dramatized, but what makes this swift summer trifle so diverting is the embodiment of the women themselves. N and A are perfect incarnations of their congressional doppelgängers . . . .
He praises both actors.
The Timesman, however, points out that “the conflict that Correa means to foreground as political keeps falling out of its frame,” explaining, “However policy-oriented the relationship was in Washington, onstage it becomes personal despite the playwright’s intentions.”
Green complains that “Correa is unable to keep the back-and-forth political debate from falling into a rut.” As an example, he notes that “N”’s notion of the chain in which every fight leads to the next (Green called this the “ouroboros,” which I thought was kinda clever) “gets tiring fast, or would, had the actors not long since taken over the play’s agenda.”
In the Wall Street Journal, Isherwood opens with a quip: “Given the existential despair in which most Democrats are swimming—or drowning—an evening at ‘N/A’ . . . will almost qualify as comfort food, or a weighted blanket soothing the nerves.”
“Mr. Correa's writing,” Isherwood writes, “is sharp and smart, convincing in its understanding of the characters as we know them, and often refreshingly funny.” Diane Paulus, the WSJ reviewer attests, directed the play “with crisp authority.”
Isherwood, too, praises both actors. Taylor delivers her lines “with a delicacy that nevertheless keeps their acerbic veneer firmly polished,” he reports, and Villafañe “does not shy from portraying Alexandria as, at times, stubborn and high-handed.”
He concludes that “[e]ven at just 80 minutes, ‘N/A’ can feel like a series of debates circling around the same subjects . . . . Nevertheless, even if it does resemble a debate without moderators, as such things go it passes like a refreshing breeze . . . .”
On Vulture, McHenry, noting that the play’s described as “a battle of wills—and wits,” protests that “[t]he wits, and most of the play’s will, tilt solidly in N’s favor.” He adds that “N/A . . . is like being stuck at dinner with a relative you wish would please talk about anything else (do N and A have any thoughts on the weather?). It’s claustrophobic, and ultimately boring . . . .”
“[T]he structure traps the performers in limited caricatures,” McHenry asserts. Taylor “specializes in playing toughened older women” and “applies all her steel to N, throwing out one-liners with hefty torque . . . .” In contrast, “Villafañe’s done musicals . . . and her angle on A turns the congresswoman into something of a flustered theater kid.”
On TheaterMania, Zachary Stewart capsulizes N/A, which he labels “this 80-minute political hagiography,” thus:
If you’re looking for a comedy that flatters the sensibilities of Boomer liberals without ever rudely suggesting that they might bear some responsibility for the overwrought state of our politics, this is your ticket.
Of the actors, Stewart says,
Villafañe is the more convincing mimic of the two, perfectly capturing AOC’s pitch and cadence. She does a fine job completing the task set out by Correa’s script, which is to set up the pins for Taylor to knock down.
He switches sports references and remarks that Villafañe “throw[s] softballs to her comedy partner,” so he can quip that “Taylor easily knocks them out of the park.” Of Taylor’s “N,” the TheaterMania review-writer proclaims, “She’s less Nancy Pelosi than she is Lady Bracknell with a gavel. She dispenses salty morsels of wisdom . . . .”
“Diane Paulus helms the production with a steady hand and on a relatively slim design budget,” writes Stewart. “Myung Hee Cho’s set of transparent office furniture on dull carpet suggests a popup Thai restaurant . . . .”
The reviewer’s final assessment is that
N/A succeeds as a light summer comedy for the vote-blue-no-matter-who set. But if you’re looking for reassurances that liberals young and old have . . . learned any valuable lessons that will keep Donald Trump out of the White House, I’m afraid they’re not available.
Russo of New York Theatre Guide finds that
Correa’s approach to N/A . . . feels like that of a politician's speechwriter. The task is to carefully curate an image of his subjects that’s commanding and true—perhaps with the occasional imperfection or vulnerability so as to be human, but making sure they’re someone you can root for.
“Correa deftly advances his goal with spirited, entertaining writing,” says Russo. “A few lines sound like they truly were written for a speech . . ., but he makes up for them with a stream of zingers.” She continues, “It seems more likely to reinforce people’s existing alliances than encourage them to really consider other perspectives. The play feels tailor-made, and -timed, for one express purpose: Get out the vote.”
Observer’s Feng slams N/A, the latest on a spate of plays “with shortened character names” as the least surprising, most anemic of the bunch.” She adds that “N/A is about as suspenseful as an electoral abecedarium.”
“Part of the problem has to do with déjà vu.” Feng explains. Correa . . . sticks closely to the facts (so many facts!), delivering dutiful capsule summaries of the women’s backgrounds and hobbyhorses with the efficiency and spontaneity of a teleprompter . . . .” “N/A,” declares the Observer writer, “suffers from . . . information overload. The welter of information is funneled through exposition-heavy dialogue and needlepoint-ready slogans.”
On This Week in New York, Mark Rifkin dubs N/A “potent.” He pronounces Pelosi as “splendidly portrayed by Taylor,” and AOC as “fully embodied by Ana Villafañe.” (Reporting that after he got home, he watched “the debacle of a debate” between the 2024 presidential candidates . . . and wisecracked that he “decided to cast my vote for Taylor.”)
Rifkin designates Correa’s script as “well-written” and finds it “astutely directed by Tony winner Diane Paulus . . . .” “Cho’s costumes capture the characters to a T,” the reviewer states.
“Taylor shines as Pelosi,” declares Rifkin; “it’s as if she has a glow as she tries to educate the younger congresswoman in the ways of politics, and the world itself. She exhibits Pelosi’s confidence, intelligence, and understanding of the tactics of negotiation in her every movement.”
“Villafañe . . .,” reports the TWINY reviewer, “more than holds her own with Taylor, capturing her character’s determination, aggressiveness, and refusal to compromise.”
Samuel L. Leiter on Theater Life acknowledges that while N/A “breaks no ground dramaturgically, it does exactly what it sets out to do, which is to imagine a series of encounters . . . between the politicians.” He adds that “Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe are ideally cast, . . . making it easy to imagine that what we’re witnessing approximates reality.”
Leiter points out that “Correa gives both women enough personal detail to make them believable simulacra of the real-life people they represent.” He adds. “Both performers are excellent and not only because of how closely they resemble their famous counterparts.”
“Villafañe . . . brings fiery conviction to A’s radical aspirations, along with sincere frustration at the political realities she must deal with,” finds Leiter. “As so often in the past,” he says of Taylor, “I was impressed by how she can turn on a dime from emotion to emotion, or put a spin on three or four words to conjure a big laugh out of them.”
Director Paulus “elicits sharply edged performances,” finds Leiter, “but her staging . . . can be a bit clunky, with blocking seemingly motivated more by a need to get the actors moving than from organic motives; too often, the actors seem to be playing to the audience [rather] than to each other” (as I noted myself).
“As represented by the conflict between the steady, if ploddingly incremental, bridge-building practices of someone like Nancy Pelosi,” Leiter sums up, “and the angry, outspoken, bridge-burning tactics of someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the result is a drama that not only has educational value but strikes enough dramatic sparks to light up the stage.”
In N/A’s “fly-on-the-wall view of the pairing of and occasional headbutting between longtime congressional superstar ‘N’ (as in Nancy Pelosi) and blazing newcomer ‘A’ (as in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez),” says Howard Miller on Talkin’ Broadway,
[t]he sense of authenticity is aided to a prodigious degree by whip-cracking, razor-sharp performances by Holland Taylor as N, delivering both calm self-assuredness and subtle sarcasm with pitch-perfect timing, and Ana Villafañe as A, offering scorching indictments of “the system” with the fervency of an evangelical Fury.
In the end, Miller believes, “even though audience members are unlikely to be surprised by the stances of each of the two, it is the personalities and the beautifully crafted and performed interplay between them that makes N/A such a pleasure to watch.”
On Lighting & Sound America, David Barbour spent most of his notice describing the contents of N/A—and much of that writing about Holland Taylor’s “N”—instead of evaluating it. He did finally make some critical comments, however:
[Director Paulus] keeps the conversation on a constant simmer and Taylor always has a zinger on hand when things start to get too much like the Sunday morning talk shows. [Myung Hee] Cho’s spare set design is a fine canvas for the projections by POSSIBLE and Lisa Renkel . . . .
Since we’re clearly in for a wild political summer—I write this on the morning after the first presidential debate, as panic grips Democrats across the land—some, looking for theatrical escape, may find N/A to be a little too much like a ninety-minute session with Politico or The Hill. But Correa is asking questions that should concern us all and Taylor is a show all by herself. Democracy may be in crisis but at least we can laugh about it.
“Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe are perfectly cast in this intelligent and illuminating comedy . . .,” reports Jonathan Mandell in his opening sentence on New York Theater. “Opening on the night of an unprecedented debate between a President and a former President,” he adds, “the play is itself something of a debate over issues, strategies and priorities that directly apply to the state of the nation now.”
“At the same time, ‘N/A’ aims to entertain.”
Mandell finds that Correa achieves the goal he wrote about in the program (quoted above), “with N and A exchanging views on issues like health care, climate change, and immigration, but ultimately arguing over the best way to effect change.”
The review-writer cavils slightly, saying, “If ‘N/A’ offers little of [Saturday Night Live’s] brand of satiric silliness, the play is threaded with a comic looseness.” Mandell adds,
Both Congresswomen are undeniably sharp, but it seems unlikely that the real Pelosi and AOC engage in such witty banter, which in my experience is rare to encounter outside a TV show. Coincidentally or not, much of the production’s design recalls a TV studio, at least a political one, with a barebones set and computer graphics of colorful stars with a “whoosh” sound in between scenes.
He backs off slightly, acknowledging that “it’s hard to object to the laugh lines in the play, which temper—and are tempered by—the serious discussions . . . .”
It doesn’t hurt that both Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe are able to deliver the comedy without compromising their credible portrayal of these actual women . . . .
In the end, Mandell has reservations:
“N/A” may not be a political play for the ages. As the playwright himself acknowledges, it’s only “lightly imagined.” It doesn’t quite go anywhere. The ending feels almost arbitrary; nothing is really resolved. But isn’t that exactly where we are right now?
Darryl Reilly of Theater Scene, dubs N/A a “witty and absorbing two-character fantasia” and says “it believably imagines Pelosi’s contentious relationship with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Generational and ideological clashes abound.”
Reilly describes the play as “a lively 75-minute battle of opposing wills amidst the passing scene” and reports that “Diane Paulus’s snappy physical staging achieves visual verisimilitude” while “Myung Hee Cho’s spare Lucite-themed scenic design perfectly represents power offices with a museum-style dimension, and her luxurious costume design authentically duplicates Pelosi’s regal red skirt suit and Ocasio-Cortez’s stylish black ensemble.”
He writes that “N/A is a strongly performed and stimulating entertainment” with Taylor delivering “a grand performance using her own distinctive honeyed vocal cadences, rather than attempting a Pelosi impression,” while “Villafañe’s charisma, sleek physicality and animation, accurately capture Ocasio-Cortez’s persona; youthful idealism is movingly articulated.” Reilly concludes that “Ms. Villafañe’s and Taylor’s marvelous histrionic teamwork puts N/A over as a thoughtful take on contemporary American politics.”
Remarking on Correa’s program note that N/A was “heavily researched and lightly imagined,” Culture Sauce’s Thom Geier laments, “Would that it had been more deeply researched or even more imaginatively executed. As it stands, the show clearly tips the balance toward the octogenarian in this battle of the wills . . . .”
Geier expresses misgivings about the playwriting, objecting,
There’s a superficiality to the portrayals here, one that seems to be borne of Wikipedia bios, quotes from speeches and interviews, and yes, even, social media posts. Despite Diane Paulus’s crisp direction, the characters too often seem like animatronic figures from Disney’s Hall of Presidents rather than flesh-and-blood people.
On Off Off Online, Colin Macdonald declares that “Mario Correa’s N/A . . . is downright enjoyable, with sharp, quippy, idea-laden writing that can feel as though plucked from The West Wing . . . .” “One doesn’t need to be a political junkie to appreciate N/A,” Macdonald advises, “as its ideas and conflicts are laid out clearly, though there are some Easter eggs for overconsumers of political news . . . .”
The OOO reviewer continues,
Diane Paulus’s precise direction avoids the stasis that can sometimes afflict two-handers: the way the actors sit, orbit one another, and where they stand all seem to symbolize their power struggle—no movement feels slack or accidental.
“A strength of Correa’s writing is the ability to locate humor amid the debates,” finds Macdonald, although “[t]here are moments when the play’s debates feel repetitive . . . .” The review-writer concludes, “The tug-of-war is engrossing, funny, and ultimately moving, with two fine-tuned performances that evoke the namesake characters but are not crude impressions.”
