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★★★★★ Lanford Wilson’s work has always thrived in the margins—those quiet, unguarded moments where people reveal themselves without meaning to. Deep Flight Productions lean into that instinct with real clarity in this alternating double‑bill, pairing the absurd domestic rupture of Breakfast at the Track with the tense, slow‑unfolding confession of A Poster of the Cosmos. Seen together, they form a compact but surprisingly resonant study of human connection under pressure.
Breakfast at the Track
Publicity material describes this as an “absurdist dark comedy” about a couple at domestic breaking point, and that’s accurate—but it undersells the strange, brittle charm of the piece. Wilson’s script is a ten‑minute pressure cooker: repetitive, circular, and deliberately trivial, yet shot through with the unmistakable ache of two people who no longer know how to speak to one another.
Geoff Stoner and Margaret Curry play the unnamed couple with a taut, lived‑in chemistry — Stoner simmering under the weight of unspoken frustration, Curry matching him beat for beat with a performance that turns quiet resignation into something quietly explosive.
Geoff Stoner and Margaret Curry
Performed here as a two‑hander—a pre‑dawn hotel‑room encounter between a couple —the play works because the performers refuse to soften it. The rhythm is sharp, almost mechanical, but never robotic. There’s humour, yes, but it’s the kind that comes from desperation rather than levity. You feel the weight of the ritual, the way repetition becomes a shield against the truth neither wants to name.
It’s a miniature, but a well‑judged one: a quick, jagged inhale before the longer, darker exhale that follows.
A Poster of the Cosmos
If Breakfast at the Track is all surface tension, A Poster of the Cosmos is the slow reveal of what happens when that tension finally breaks. Set in a Manhattan police station, where a man recounts events under interrogation , the play begins in a register of defensiveness and agitation. The character pushes the audience away, almost daring us to misunderstand him.
It’s an alienating start—but deliberately so. Wilson’s writing is built on deferred exposition, and Deep Flight’s staging honours that. The monologue gradually shifts from hostility to something far more fragile, as the man’s long‑term relationship comes into focus and the emotional logic of his behaviour begins to make sense. What initially reads as anger reveals itself as fear; what looks like self‑absorption becomes grief.
Geoff Stoner delivers A Poster of the Cosmos as a tightly coiled, quietly devastating monologue — a man circling his own memories like unstable orbit, letting the cracks show only when he can no longer hold the centre.
The production handles the AIDS‑era context with restraint. Nothing is sensationalised, nothing is framed as a twist. It’s simply the truth the character has been circling, unable to articulate it cleanly. The performance is tightly controlled—no melodrama, no pleading for sympathy. The contradictions are allowed to stand: shame, tenderness, panic, devotion. It’s a portrayal that understands grief as something jagged and unresolved.
This is a piece that improves in retrospect. During the performance, the emotional distance can feel like a flaw; afterwards, it feels like part of the design. The monologue lingers because it quietly rearranges your understanding of the man at its centre. That’s certainly how it worked for me.
Together as a Programme
The two plays are distinct in tone yet thematically linked, tracing “moments when ordinary lives are tested and reshaped” . The pairing works because it creates an emotional arc: the brittle absurdity of Breakfast at the Track primes you for the deeper rupture of A Poster of the Cosmos.
The second play is unquestionably the stronger, but the first is essential. Without it, Cosmos might feel too stark; with it, the evening becomes a study in contrast—light and heavy, immediate and reflective, comic surface and emotional depth.
Deep Flight Productions continue to show why Wilson’s work still resonates: minimalism, honesty, and a willingness to trust the audience. This is Fringe theatre doing exactly what Fringe theatre should—small stories, told with care, that open into something unexpectedly large.
Reviewed by Pat Harrington
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