KEERAH’S WAYWARD WANDERINGS:
DON’T LOOK BACK—OR DO

An ambitious meta-theatrical drama of love
and loss boasts terrific performances but
struggles to find its focus with too many detours

Beck Nolan and Netta Walker

There are many things to recommend about Netta Walker‘s new play Keerah, her first, but director McKenzie Chinn has yet to shape its intriguing ideas into a fully involving theatrical experience at Definition Theatre, where the four-hander opened last night.

The premise is a strong one. Ciara (“Keerah” in the Irish pronunciation from which the title is derived), played by Walker, is working in a Chicago restaurant managed by her best friend Lucy (Cat Christmas). There she meets Cormac (Beck Nolan), an Irish immigrant whose work visa is about to expire. Their relationship begins with an engaging meet-cute and quickly deepens through conversations about poetry, literature, Sisyphus, and the natural world (both are aspiring writers). Meanwhile, Lucy is romantically entwined with Cormac’s flatmate Finn (Jacob Coggshall), creating an increasingly tangled web of personal and professional relationships.

Jacob Coggshall and Cat Christmas

Complications arise when Cormac, facing the imminent end of his visa, avoids confronting reality by taking a massive dose of ketamine. The choice is especially troubling for Ciara, whose own history with addiction remains close to the surface. As tensions mount and Cormac contemplates fleeing America altogether, the play appears headed toward one kind of romantic drama before revealing itself to be something else entirely.

Netta Walker and Beck Nolan

Act II finds Ciara in London seven years after Cormac left Chicago. She has transformed her brief summer romance into a successful television show, with Lucy now working as her manager (although, confoundingly, Lucy swears she’s never been to Chicago; this must be an Easter egg of some kind, but it eluded me). What follows is a meta-theatrical examination of memory, authorship, and the consequences of turning private experiences into public art. The play increasingly concerns itself with who owns a story once it has been lived, remembered, revised, and ultimately repackaged for a TV audience.

Beck Nolan and Jacob Coggshall

Although inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice, the play is less a retelling of the myth than a contemporary relationship drama that borrows some of its themes. Ideas about loss, longing, absence, and the temptation to revisit the past hover over the action, but they never fully coalesce into a dramatic framework. As a result, the mythology often feels more alluded to than integrated, particularly in the increasingly complicated second act.

Netta Walker

The questions are intriguing. The execution is less successful.

Director McKenzie Chinn never quite solves the challenges of staging the piece in a thrust configuration. Much of the blocking appears designed for a proscenium stage, leaving audience members seated on the sides frequently staring at actors’ backs or straining to catch lines delivered across the stage. Garrett Bell‘s lighting contributes some striking noir-inspired shadows, while Isa Noe‘s detailed set feels thoroughly lived in, though portions of the scenery remain visible during scenes set elsewhere.

Beck Nolan and Netta Walker

Tonally, the production is all over the map. Some scenes crackle with energy, wit, and persuasive dialogue while others linger so long that momentum drains away. The play is by turns funny, didactic, repetitive, exciting, rapturous, and occasionally baffling, particularly during the increasingly convoluted second act. The gorgeous opening projection sequence by Erin Pleake, styled after a 1930s MGM title sequence, promises one kind of experience, but the evening ultimately attempts to juggle mythology, superstition, addiction, romance, artistic creation, family secrets, and questions of personal responsibility. Not all of those elements fit comfortably together. Plus, we never find out what happened with Lucy and Finn—their story just drops out of sight.

Netta Walker and Beck Nolan

What does work, often brilliantly, is the acting. Netta Walker, Beck Nolan, Cat Christmas, and Jacob Coggshall bring conviction and emotional intelligence to material that sometimes struggles to support them. Their performances—and the men’s thrilling dialects—keep the audience invested even when the narrative wanders. For that reason alone, I can recommend the production.

Cat Christmas, Netta Walker and Beck Nolan

Still, Keerah feels substantially under-edited. The published running time is listed as two hours, including a ten-minute intermission, yet the performance ran nearly forty-five minutes longer. There is a compelling play somewhere inside this ambitious script. At present, however, it asks its audience to work much harder than necessary to find it.

Netta Walker and Beck Nolan

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photos by Joe Mazza / Brave Lux

Keerah
Definition Theatre | 1160 E. 55th Street, Chicago
approximately 2 hours and 45 minutes, including intermission
ends on June 22, 2026
for tickets, visit Definition

for more shows, visit Theatre in Chicago

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