Theatre Review: Drag Me Away
by Rebecca Nesvet
DRAG ME AWAY
By Chuck Rybak
World Premiere Wisconsin
At the Weidner Theatre Studio One
Tickets Available Nov 12–Nov 15, 2026
Did you hear the one about Marissa Mayer, the tech executive? Her daughter's preschool asked her, rather presumptuously, for three adjectives that describe her child. Mayer was stumped. (To her credit, she read the email. Some tech execs might have sent it forthwith to the great circular file in the sky.) What did she do? She worked the problem—by deputing it to an AI chatbot. "Describe my daughter in three adjectives." It did. Mission accomplished. I hope that Mayer will enjoy her windowless room in the most frugal of corporate-managed assisted living facilities circa 2050.
This is our society now, or there are people who want it to be, and maybe a good response is humor. Chuck Rybak and the Weidner Theatre in Green Bay are delivering just such a response onstage right now. DRAG ME AWAY, Rybak's funny, haunting new minimalist play, is being performed there November 6-13. Directed by Steven Rupsch at the Weidner's Studio One experimental theatre space, DRAG ME AWAY stars Noah Simon (AEA) and Kelli Strickland. It is presented as part of the World Premiere Wisconsin 2026 festival, in which Rybak's script won a place.
The characters are a Man and a Woman. They're a straight couple, someplace in suburbia, a land of single-family homes and lawns with grass and bored, slightly nosy neighbors. They're burnt out but sharing a ritual evening meal of asparagus risotto--comfort food, easily thrown together by people with no more proverbial spoons. Afterwards, the man plans to do something fun, but not energetic fun. Watch TV. Maybe a movie. Maybe the same one they always watch, because it is familiar, and comfortable. Netflix, hold the chill.
The woman comes up with a more interesting idea. What if the house was on fire? What if they had to make choices? To prove something? To each other? To actually —like never—THINK? And better, yet, they might feel… something.
“I’ll be outside, away from the burning,” the Woman imagines,” and the whole world will be different. A fresh start. It will be like those people on tv when something dramatic happens to them and then, boom! Afterward, they live an entirely different life.”
Their increasingly absurd and very funny game of improvisation is Tom Stoppard's "word tennis" – they strive to say what will keep the ball in the air, the conversation going, the television off. For once. Forever?
Why a fire? Well, what is more Northeast Wisconsin than a fire? We had a Great Fire in 1871. It was horrific. It also came to a world not yet accustomed to living online; a community that had to help each other to try to survive.
Like Stoppard's word tennis, the Man and Woman’s antics are funny and also insightful. Joke, joke, joke, and then a crash into meaning. A few times over, like a symphony.
The fire that the Woman and Man imagine is nothing like that, but it responds to a similar emergency: Climate change, fuelled by commerce and consumerism and Tantalus-like emptiness that fast-shipped Amazon boxes full of “fun pants” cannot fill. What can we do about problems larger than ourselves, that we can only try to solve in incremental ways? Can we do more than just watch the temperature go up, or the war go on?
We have to, one character proposes. “If a threat is distant, or hard to describe, then we ignore it, say, “Ah, I’ll deal with that later.” We just let problems grow and grow and we can’t be bothered until they show up with a vengeance.”
DRAG ME AWAY reminds us of one leisure activity that isn't meant to reinforce comfort, that requires thought, and that pays off in escape and self-recognition and, yes, love. Going to the (live) theatre.
Rebecca Nesvet's book James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family (Routledge, 2024) won the Victorian Popular Fiction Association's First Book Award. Forthcoming: Sweeney Todd in Victorian Popular Culture (Anthem, 2029).