Theater Review: ‘The Book Club Play,’ Dorset Theatre Festival

Many book clubs are social accidents waiting to happen. Anyone can go rogue in a group that encourages eating snacks, drinking wine and straying off the topic of the merits of the book at hand. In Karen Zacarías’ 2009 The Book Club Play, we meet six people with the highest hopes for stimulating discussion, stymied by the comic reality of their well-meant snobbery and haplessly limited self-knowledge. The Dorset Theatre Festival production is luxurious comedy.

Ana is a newspaper columnist with a beautiful home, gilded with sconces, bookcases and crown molding. Will, a fastidious museum curator, was Ana’s first college beau and is still her intellectual BFF. Rob is Ana’s husband and Will’s former college roommate; the threesome stayed friends in a love story that might not be quite over. Jen, Ana’s friend, is a scatterbrained paralegal with a scandal hidden in her history. Lily is Ana’s protégé at the newspaper, ingenuous in manner but eager to advance. Alex is a literature professor who’s ready to pit pop culture against academe.

A prestigious Danish director is making a documentary on the book club phenomenon and has installed an unmanned camera in Ana and Rob’s living room. The documentary provides only one comic consequence, but it pops up multiple times: We thought we were alone, and now we want our privacy back. Wide-eyed people pleading with an implacable lens to erase something is fairly funny, but for the most part, the documentary gag adds little here except some stakes for Ana.

Not that she needs them raised. She’s already on edge, keen to show off her book club. Ana wears a rigid yet elegant braid that marks her for comic comeuppance yet makes us love her for trying so hard. The book club is her greatest creation, and she wants the world to see the salon she’s built and the brilliance of her observations. Unless, of course, the group operates at its usual ratio of one book insight to 50 interpersonal observations, many of them resulting in awkward moments.

Even with a camera on, there’s a surprising amount of kissing and no shortage of messy group dynamics. But the play is never crazy chaos; it’s comedy built from character. The currency exchanged at a book club is how people want to be seen and understood. They don’t always know themselves, but books and friendship give them ideas.

Zacarías supplies the humor, and director Jackson Gay mines it to perfection with a well-tuned ensemble. Gay moves the play at a stimulating pace, mindful that pace isn’t speed but the energy built from what just happened, including the time it takes to react to it.

The Dorset cast keeps the shells of the characters’ manners in place while hinting at the untidy needs, hopes and fears beneath. The result is propulsive action from people who can control themselves only so long. Caitlin Clouthier (Ana) has the twin comic skills of playing a fool with utmost commitment and clarifying each reaction into crystal purity. Alfredo Narciso (Rob), with good-dog ease, shambles about without a care in the world until, bang, he has a few.

Lucas Dixon (Will) uses a glorious stiffness to convey airtight intellectualism, but it can’t protect him from self-discovery and, most surprising, joy. Abigail Stephenson (Lily) is ever the youngest, bouncing onto the sofa and into quiet competition with Ana, oscillating unpredictably from innocence to experience.

Elizabeth Narciso (Jen) is skilled at hiding like a standard bookish introvert until she can’t resist blurting out thoughts that startle even her. Jax Jackson (Alex) is an elfin little intruder, hijacking the club’s artistic aspirations while trying to wiggle into its members’ hearts.

Structurally, the play presents six different book club meetings, each churning up comments far from the book’s plot but close to the members’ concerns. Reading proves to be a route to self-discovery, particularly when reactions are shared. And the right book at the right time, as Will notes, can do wonders.

Rob, known for never reading the books, finally proves he can finish one, and it’s Edith Wharton’s nuanced classic The Age of Innocence. Of all things, Rob is moved to deep reflection by Newland Archer’s subtle, sad recognition of lost opportunity. Will, whose literary standards come with a finer-things nose sniff, grudgingly takes on a bestseller experiment and consumes the intricate plot of The Da Vinci Code. It changes his life.

At each meeting, a character reads a passage from the book, and these have the effect of lifting viewers away from passively watching action on a stage and closer to the imaginative effort of reading alone. The lights hyper-illuminate the living room’s serene bookcases; each book title, rendered in princely Garamond with a wash of illustration, is projected onto the walls, and the well-performed reading tugs us into the world of the book.

It’s magical, in part thanks to Dorset’s magnificent production values. Scenic designer Riw Rakkulchon has created a gorgeous living room that expresses the play’s tone — the stunning room is also absurdly grandiose. Lighting designer Paul Whitaker provides the baseline bright lighting that comedy requires, but he has plenty of tricks to amplify a mood or convey the concentration a book can inspire in a reader.

Joey Moro’s projection designs are clever tributes to the books, and Daniel Baker’s sound design, while occasionally too assertive, is quite successful when atmospheric. Costume designer Vanessa Leuck keeps enhancing our knowledge of the characters with costume changes for each meeting.

The Book Club Play is light entertainment, but this production brings out tender moments, too, and the comic craft is superb. These book club members carry ridiculous flaws and face funny revelations, then settle under newfound truths. Many comedies shrink the characters so their problems will stand out like inflated cartoon injuries. Here, director and actors trust us to see what’s funny about these well-read, well-intentioned, ultimately silly souls.

This article appears in Jul 16-22, 2025.

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