A RESERVOIR OF JOKES—
AND NOT MUCH DEPTH

An intriguing premise about addiction
and fading memory gets diluted
by a steady stream of punchlines

If you’ve ever put a puzzle together or tried to fix a broken piece of pottery, you’re well prepared for The Reservoir, the new play by Jake Brasch making its Off-Broadway premiere at Atlantic Theater Company.

Caroline Aaron & Noah Galvin

The drama focuses on Josh (Noah Galvin) a young, gay alcoholic, who has flunked out of NYU and been thrown out of his rehab program. Now he is returning to his home near the Cherry Creek Reservoir in Colorado after a drinking spree that has left him with considerable memory loss.

Noah Galvin & Chip Zien

His single mother (Heidi Armbruster) decides to give him one more chance, despite her reservations, and even pulls strings to get him a job at a local bookstore, where he is supervised by Hugo (Matthew Saldívar), the overworked store manager who  – guess what – is a gay alcoholic too!

Peter Maloney, Mary Beth Peil, and Noah Galvin

In a series of disconnected  scenes that must have been a challenge for director Shelley Butler, the play takes place in real time, in Josh’s mind and perhaps in both. We see Josh with his two sets of grandparents. Irene (Mary Beth Peil) and Hank (Peter Maloney) are midwestern Christians who have recently moved to an assisted care facility because of Irene’s advancing Alzheimer’s. Beverly (Caroline Aaron) is a wise-cracking and worldly Jew, who likes to use the f-word and is divorced from Shrimpy (Chip Zien), who seems obsessed with his youthful sexual fantasies.

Heidi Armbruster & Noah Galvin

What all the grandparents have in common is that they suffer from or will suffer from dementia. Irene has fallen victim to the disease first, and Josh is determined to help her by improving her diet, attending aerobics with her and trying to reignite her reservoir of mental acuity.

Mary Beth Peil, Caroline Aaron, Noah Galvin, Chip Zien, and Peter Maloney

It’s up to Galvin to make the smooth transitions between scenes, and his likable portrayal of Josh does this to some extent. But he doesn’t have much in his bag of tricks. Josh is cute (especially when he breaks the fourth wall, which he does constantly, as the narrator), Josh is awkward, Josh is repentant and cries – over and over again.

Mary Beth Peil, Noah Galvin, Heidi Armbruster,
Caroline Aaron, Peter Maloney, and Chip Zien

If you haven’t figured it out by now, Brasch is equating Josh’s alcoholic fog with his grandparents’ diminishing mental abilities, and the reservoir near his home, with the reservoir of resources that Dr. Yaakovs Stern, author of Cognitive Reserve: Theory and Application, believes we all have. But the exploration never goes too deep. Brasch is much too interested in keeping us amused.

Heidi Armbruster, Peter Maloney, Chip Zien, Caroline Aaron, and Noah Galvin

In fact, despite its serious content, much of The Reservoir aims to be funny. If you enjoy one-liners and jokes that have little to do with what the play is actually about, you may find yourself laughing quite a bit as the play unfolds. But if you find the cute but irrelevant and obvious jokes tiring, you may discover that after two hours and fifteen minutes, you’ve had more than enough.

Noah Galvin & Matthew Saldívar

Takeshi Kata has created a set made up of blue fabric panels of varying lengths. This probably represents the waves of water that are constantly running through Josh’s mind, sometimes causing such disturbance that he is driven to drink. From time to time, movable scenery is rolled onto the set – a book cart for the scenes in the bookstore, a pulpit where Shrimpy has his second bar mitzvah (perhaps the best scene in the show).

This season seems unusually rich in plays about dementia and addiction (Dinosaurs at Playwrights Horizons and Marjorie Prime on Broadway, for example). For reasons that remain puzzling, playwrights increasingly treat these conditions as a source of humor. Unfortunately, such is rarely the case in real life.

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photos by Ahron R. Foster

The Reservoir
Atlantic Theater Company
Linda Gross Theater, 336 West 20 Street
2 hours 15 minutes, one intermission
ends on March 22, 2026
for tickets visit Atlantic Theater

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