Regional Theater: A Novel

In a small town, a doomed new musical changes the destinies of its cast and crew, whose lives inadvertently intersect over decades in a sweeping novel of friendship, fate, and love.

Everything is going according to plan until Angela Tremblay snaps a tendon. The star of the fledgling musical East River!, set to premiere in a matter of days at a regional theater in Saratoga Springs, Angela is the show ’s only remotely well-known cast member. Her injury throws the myriad personal dramas of the production’s other players into the light: Mark, a handsome and chaotic chorus boy, who is sleeping with an older professor at a nearby college; Warren, a veteran character actor, who is consumed by the deaths of his friends from AIDS while balancing his feelings for Paul, the theater’s artistic director and an old flame; Louise, Paul’s wife, who worries for her queer son, PJ, and resents her husband's bisexuality; and Kathy, the stage manager, who tries to protect the production from further catastrophe.

The show is an unmitigated disaster. But unbeknownst to its cast and crew, the handful of unremarkable months they spent together will come to define the rest of their lives. Across several decades, from the despair of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s all the way through 2010s New York City, Thomas Grattan’s magisterial, bighearted Regional Theater follows East River!’s extended community—not only Angela, Warren, Mark, Louise, PJ, and Kathy, but also an unforgettable, interlocking group of tangential figures who crossed the show’s path—as they attempt to find connection in a fractured, complicated world. With nimble movement between a chorus of voices, and staged with humor and deep feeling, Regional Theater is a loving homage to the messiness and beauty of artistic creation, even—and especially—when things fall apart.