Lean-To

A multi-day hike is supposed to be restorative: an interval in which the civilized world recedes, the body remembers that it has muscles, and the mind, deprived of its usual electronic distractions, is given a chance to wander. But the woods have their own ideas about solitude. In Stephen Sheffer’s warm, funny, unexpectedly poignant "Lean-To," now playing at 59E59 Theaters, a rustic shelter becomes the unlikely site of a three-person collision involving loneliness, romance, race, vulnerability, betrayal and the peculiar intimacy that can arise when strangers are forced to share a roof. Directed with considerable sensitivity by Jesse Jou, the play gradually reveals itself as a small-scale comedy about the enormous difficulty of being alone with oneself—and the equally enormous difficulty of being alone with someone else. [more]