Anchored by April Fossen’s fierce, vulnerable performance as Bari, and directed with sensitivity by Jason Bowcutt, the show explores mental health, meaning-making, and human connection with honesty and wit. A timely, life-affirming piece that feels especially urgent in 2025. Playing through May 17 at the Rose Wagner Black Box Theatre. Don’t miss it.
SALT LAKE CITY, UT—In Be Here Now, Deborah Zoe Laufer crafts a theatrical meditation on beauty, mortality, and the ethics of presence. PYGmalion Theatre Company’s 2025 production, directed with care and clarity by Jason Bowcutt, leans into the tension between despair and wonder, offering an experience that is as visually stunning as it is emotionally rich. At the heart of the play lies a quietly radical proposition: what if the whole world is already art—and what if recognizing that fact is an ethical act?
Photo credit: Robert Holman
To live in the brokenness of the world—and still call it beautiful—is an ethics of survival.
~Rhetorical Review~
The story centers on Bari, a former professor of nihilism whose life has contracted into gray disillusionment after losing her academic post and returning to her rural hometown. Played by April Fossen with wit and aching vulnerability, Bari begins to experience seizure-like episodes that shatter her bleak worldview, flooding her with moments of transcendent, inexplicable joy. These visions—aesthetic, overwhelming, dangerous—threaten to dismantle her reliance on control, rationality, and detachment. Urgent, raw, and quietly radical, PYGmalion’s Be Here Now is a meditation on presence, beauty, and the ethics of noticing.
Contextualizing the Playwright and Premiere
Deborah Zoe Laufer is a widely produced American playwright known for her ability to blend humor with ethical, philosophical, and emotional inquiry. Her work often navigates the messy intersections of science, spirituality, mortality, and interpersonal relationships. Laufer’s background includes fellowships with the Dramatists Guild and the Lark Play Development Center, and her plays have been staged at many of the nation’s top regional theatres.
Be Here Now premiered in 2018 at Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, directed by Michael Evan Haney. The play was quickly recognized for its sharp writing and emotional intelligence. Critics at the time praised Laufer’s deft balance of metaphysical questions and quirky, character-driven comedy, comparing her style to that of Sarah Ruhl or Annie Baker, with a distinct voice rooted in Jewish-American humor and existential irony.
Art as an Ethical Practice
The play emerges from a post-2016 sociopolitical landscape—a time marked by widespread disillusionment, cultural fragmentation, and a growing mental health crisis. In Be Here Now, Laufer doesn’t offer easy hope, but instead suggests that meaning might be found in fleeting moments of connection, even amid deterioration and death. The seizure episodes Bari experiences raise questions not only about medical diagnosis but about the limits of rationalism and the possibility of mystical or embodied knowledge.
“The whole world is art. Most people just don’t notice.”
— Mike, Be Here Now
Photo Credit: Robert Holman
This broader dramaturgical context amplifies the kairotic (timely) relevance of PYGmalion Theatre Company’s 2025 production. In a country still grappling with the emotional fallout of pandemic-era disruption and ongoing sociopolitical tension, the play’s exploration of how one lives meaningfully within uncertainty feels even more urgent. The PYGmalion press release taps into this background with language about illness, autonomy, and the right to choose how one lives and dies—echoing not only personal crises but collective debates about healthcare, neurodivergence, and agency.
Laufer’s work has always been interested in radical empathy, and Be Here Now exemplifies this, inviting audiences to look not for transformation through epiphany, but through the slow, vulnerable work of staying present. In this way, the play fits perfectly within PYGmalion’s season and ethos, which consistently foregrounds feminist, humanist, and socially resonant storytelling.
What unfolds is not just a love story or a personal transformation arc, but an exploration of aesthetic epistemology: the idea that knowledge, healing, and even ethics can emerge through the senses, through embodiment, and through art.
BARI: I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know. I reallydon’t.
LUANNE: That’s love! That’s definitely love. Is it love?
BARI: I passed out again. And then … I don’t know. Whenit’s happening, it all makes sense.Everything makes sense. It’s not all random. Like thewhole world is art. I don’t know.
LUANNE: You’ve been touched by God!
PATTY. Sounds to me like she was touched by Mike. Haveyou been with him all this time?
BARI. I’ve been writing.
Photo Credit: Robert Holman
Bari’s counterpart in this philosophical journey is Mike (Matthew Sincell), a crow-keeping junk sculptor who sees the world as inherently meaningful: “The whole world is art. Most people just don’t notice,” he tells her. It’s not a throwaway line; it’s the aesthetic thesis of the play. Mike’s world is one where discarded things matter. His sculptures made from rusted tools and lost buttons speak to a worldview where nothing is wasted, and where grief itself can be shaped into beauty.
This aesthetic ethos is also an ethical one. For Bari, the decision about whether to undergo a surgery that may save her life but strip her of these transcendent experiences becomes a question of values: is a longer life without joy more ethical than a brief one saturated with meaning? The play never answers this question. Instead, it allows the audience to live inside it—one moment, one gesture at a time.
Performances and Direction
Bowcutt’s direction is admirably restrained, allowing these ethical and emotional stakes to unfold through performance rather than spectacle. The Black Box Theatre at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center becomes a site of intimate witnessing. Seizure episodes are rendered with minimal yet evocative lighting and sound design, emphasizing their interior, affective weight rather than externalizing them as medical trauma or mysticism.
Supporting performances by Niki Rahimi and Brenda Hattingh Peatross as Luanne and Patty bring necessary tonal contrast, deepening the emotional resonance of Bari’s journey. Rahimi’s Luanne radiates a kind of clear-eyed optimism—her sincerity is not naïve, but courageous, offering moments of lightness and warmth that challenge Bari’s cynicism without directly confronting it. Peatross‘s Patty, by contrast, embodies pragmatic tough love. Her bluntness isn’t cruelty—it’s survival instinct, honed by lived experience. Together, the two characters form a kind of emotional scaffolding around Bari, modeling different forms of relational care.
What’s most powerful is that neither woman demands a specific outcome from Bari. They don’t try to fix her, even when they don’t fully understand or agree with her choices. They simply remain—with their fear, frustration, and love intact. This steadfast presence reflects one of the play’s most moving ethical gestures: that witnessing someone’s pain without trying to resolve it can be a profound act of care. It’s a rare theatrical portrayal that honors not action, but presence—as if simply staying is a kind of sacred resistance. In a world addicted to problem-solving, Be Here Now reminds us that sometimes the most radical thing we can offer each other is attention—not correction.
PATTY: Life is a gift. And you’re pissing on it.
LUANNE: She’s not pissing on it. She just wants to be happy.…
PATTY: Well, I’m not going to stand around here and talkher into living. If you want to live, live. If you want todie, die. But I’m telling you—if you can save yourselfand you don’t do it, I don’t want anything more to dowith you. Even if you live, you’re dead to me.
LUANNE. You don’t mean that.
PATTY: It’s called tough love, Luanne. I stand by it.
LUANNE. Well, I think you’re wonderful either way, Bari.Even when you’re kind of sad and mean and awful.
Indeed, the central ethical act in Be Here Now is not decision-making, but attending—to joy, to pain, to the texture of the moment. The title itself is not just a mantra but a directive: be here, now, with what is. Laufer invites us to see aesthetics not as ornament but as a way of being. To recognize the world as art is to treat it with reverence. To live in the brokenness of the world—and still call it beautiful—is an ethics of survival.
In a world that continues to struggle with physical and mental health, political precarity, and emotional fatigue, amidst a long list of other problems, Be Here Now doesn’t offer escape. It offers a possibility: that beauty might still exist in the overlooked, the broken, and the unresolved. And that recognizing it—like art itself—is a practice worth pursuing.
April Fossen’s portrayal of Bari is a highlight—dry, sharp, and emotionally raw. Her transformation from skeptical misanthrope to open-hearted seeker is never sentimental, instead grounded in bodily vulnerability and intellectual resistance. Matthew Sincell’s Mike, a tender oddball with a crow for a companion, delivers both pathos and wry humor, embodying a character who—like the birds he reveres—is a messenger of unexpected wisdom.
Photo Credit: Rhetorical Review, Opening Night
The Craft Behind the Scenes
The creative team behind PYGmalion Theatre Company’s Be Here Now delivers a production marked by aesthetic clarity and emotional depth. Directed by Jason Bowcutt, the staging reflects a deep understanding of character-driven storytelling, with an emphasis on authenticity over spectacle. Stage Manager and Lighting Operator Jennie Pett ensures the production runs smoothly, with lighting cues that subtly guide the audience through Bari’s disorienting inner world. Allen Smith’s set design is magical, bringing Mike’s visionary junk-sculptor mind to life in every detail of the stage. Madison Howell Wilkins’s costume design captures each character’s emotional palette. Intimacy Director Liz Whittaker brings sensitivity and ethical precision to the production’s most vulnerable scenes, particularly between Bari and Mike, while navigating the emotional trauma of a character with Mike’s past. Together, the creative team crafts an experience that is both visually and thematically resonant, honoring the play’s central idea: that beauty often emerges from what we overlook.
Bowcutt’s direction keeps the show intimate and emotionally focused. He allows the play’s surreal moments—particularly Bari’s seizure-induced visions—to emerge through subtle lighting and sound design, rather than spectacle. The Black Box space at the Rose Wagner Center is used effectively, enhancing the production’s themes of isolation, confinement, and interior transformation.
What makes Be Here Now land so powerfully in 2025 is not just its sharp dialogue or philosophical bent, but its deep relevance to our current cultural moment. The play grapples with mental health, chronic illness, personal autonomy, and the longing for connection—all themes that resonate sharply after years of collective trauma and social fragmentation. Yet the play never feels heavy-handed. Instead, Laufer’s script invites the audience into Bari’s journey with warmth, wit, and honesty.
PYGmalion’s production is ultimately a call to presence. It doesn’t offer tidy conclusions, but it does suggest that meaning might be found not in certainty, but in vulnerability, risk, and human connection. In a theatrical season filled with big themes and bold experiments, Be Here Now stands out for its emotional clarity and heartfelt execution.
In a political moment defined by cycles of overwork and exhaustion, Be Here Now emerges as a quiet, powerful invitation to embrace the fragile beauty of being present. Rather than offering neat resolutions, PYGmalion’s production encourages its audience to dwell in uncertainty—with humor, vulnerability, and grace. It’s a sharp, tender, and ultimately hopeful reflection on what it means to live meaningfully in a world that resists easy clarity.
Soundtrack Companion: Be Here Now on Spotify
Be Here Now: The Soundtrack You Didn’t Know Was in Rehearsal
Apparently, I’ve been rehearsing for this review without even realizing it. Somewhere between existential dread and euphoria, my subconscious hit “shuffle” on a playlist that—like Laufer’s Be Here Now—walks the line between yearning and surrender.
This Spotify mix is a mood board of presence: quiet indie ruminations, cinematic crescendos, and just enough cathartic chaos to mimic a Bari-style brain zap. From Radiohead melancholia to Sufjan Stevens grace notes, each track seems to ask the same thing the play does: what if this moment, however cracked or fleeting, is the whole point?
Venue: Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center – Black Box Theatre
Keola received her undergraduate degrees from Brigham Young University of Hawai’i in English and music and then went on to study English literature at Weber State University for her master’s degree. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Writing and Rhetoric Studies at the University of Utah.
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