Ninth and Joanie

Tickets and Information

To like or not to like a play such as Brett C. Leonard's Ninth and Joanie, now being presented at the Bank Street Theatre by the vaunted Labyrinth Theater Company, is a bit beside the point. It's a play more to be endured.


The story focuses on a family in 1986 torn apart by tragedy in the streets of South Philadelphia. The first ten minutes are performed in near silence by Charlie, a man in his 60s (played with complex layers of sorrow by Bob Glaudini) and a younger, emotionally arrested, and clearly abused man named Rocco (Kevin Corrigan, giving an occasionally flat but oddly affecting performance in a difficult role). It takes most of those ten minutes to simply establish that these two [...]