TRAUMA, TRUTH,
AND THE STORIES WE SELL

A taut psychological thriller that cuts deep and lingers

“Look at this place. Just how rich did our trauma make you?”

Of all the devastating zingers hurled about the posh living room of Xochi’s lake house in Both, the brilliant new play by Paloma Nozicka, that’s the one that cut the deepest for me; it’s a short story in twelve words.

After an itinerant 35 years, Teatro Vista Productions, in collaboration with Steppenwolf, have settled into a residency at Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater. Their first production in their new home is a taut psychological thriller exploring grief, trauma, and compromise.

Sotirios Livaditis’s set is a tastefully appointed, if anodyne, living room; all beige and soft colors, the requisite painting of the lake on the wall. Large windows face the water. It looks like a spread from Architectural Digest, and has about as much personality—a fact that beautifully contrasts with the characters who will soon grace it.

Both opens with a brief—and to my mind, entirely unnecessary—prologue: a young woman in a manic state rushes into the house. Outside, police lights flash and sirens blare. A man bangs at the door, pleading with her to let him in, repeatedly calling out her name: Xochi.

A year later, a pregnant Xochi (Paloma Nozicka), along with her husband Sam (Brian King, in a sweetly obsequious performance), is hosting a baby shower in the lake house. It is also a year since the death of her twin brother Sebastian in a drowning accident. And it’s the first time the remnants of her family—her mother Angela and her brother Juan—are visiting her since the accident. Sebastian’s death hangs over the family, and the fact that his body was never found has instilled in Angela a sense of hope that maybe he’s not really dead, just lost.

Loss—of life, of family, of connection, of purpose—runs through every aspect of Both. Nozicka, who developed this play at the Geffen Playhouse until it was “snatched up… before anyone else could get to it” (TVP’s words), is a remarkably gifted writer, creating characters who step onto the stage fully actualized from the get-go. It’s not Sebastian’s death that has split this family apart. That rift was created by Xochi, who, having grown up with an abusive and cold father, turned her childhood suffering, warts and all, into a bestselling work of “fiction,” optioned by Reese Witherspoon for a TV series. In an attempt to heal herself, she throws her family to the wolves of public scrutiny and scandal—and makes a fortune while doing so. It’s a testament to the intelligence of this script that it never lets Xochi off the hook for what she’s done, even while it helps us understand why she had to do it.

So we have a pregnant, anxious woman; her passive-aggressive, tightly wound mother; and her angry, abrasive brother—all in one room, with more than a year’s worth of unspoken anger and resentment hovering in the air.

And then there’s a knock at the door.

Director Georgette Verdin is in the enviable position of having a terrific script and a terrific cast at their disposal, and makes the most of it. The pacing is superb, and all the performances are wonderful, but it all comes down to Xochi, who is a lead character for the ages. And Nozicka, who is as good an actor as she is a writer, is masterful in the part, holding court from the first scene to the unsettling last one. Xochi is fiercely intelligent, witty, prickly to the point of almost unlikable, and her offhanded cruelty is frequently jarring—but Nozicka never once lets us forget how Xochi got to be the way she is. In fact, the entire play is a case study in the way different people deal with trauma, and how they internalize their pain. It’s a play where a character can drop the line, “At least my dad didn’t beat the shit out of us,” and the recipient of the childhood beatings just shrugs in response. It’s the casualness of the exchange that makes it so horrifying.

There are a few issues with the play: as mentioned above, the prologue is entirely unnecessary; the score and lighting design are a bit much; and, with so much going on on stage, the character of Sam gets short shrift—the breaking of his façade never quite rings true because it comes on so abruptly. But that’s all frippery—well, not the Sam bit; that ought to be fixed—and quickly forgotten. Where Both really stings is in its last quarter, when Xochi realizes that her brutally uncompromising nature, which she wears as a badge of honor, is as much of a defense mechanism as those deployed by her family.

Late in the play, during an argument, a character drops the line, “Maybe the lie is kinder.”
Much of what happens after hangs on the truth—or lie—in that statement.

Unspoken, but lingering, is the rejoinder:
Kinder to whom?

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photos by Joel Maisonet

Both
Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater, 1700 N Halsted St, Chicago
95 minutes, no intermission
ends on May 10, 2026
for tickets ($47; Wednesdays pay-what-you-will), call 312.335.1650 or visit Steppenwolf

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

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