Review: The Bookstore, a Love Letter to Readers

Reading is my favorite way to commune with the dead. Authors like Gore Vidal, Daphne Caruana Galizia, and Anna Komnene have voices that leap off the page, as if they’ve in the room with you divulging their secrets and witty insight. With such an ancient form of immortality, who needs a prime?

The New Jersey Repertory production of Michael Walek’s sweet little drama The Bookstore, now performing off-Broadway at 59E59, is similarly preoccupied with literature and mortality. It’s set in the tiny West Village bookstore owned by Carey (Janet Zarish). She runs the shop with the help of unpublished novelist and Yale grad Abby (Arielle Goldman) and Brittany (Ari Derambakhsh), a far less vocal (but infinitely more observant) amateur writer.

They never seem to have any customers, which gives the three women plenty of time to chat about their favorite books, dating in New York, and the past lives of the 19^th-century building in which the store is located. It feels like a long episode of Designing Women, if Mary Jo had read all of Proust.

Until the second act, only we are privy to the life-and-death stakes simmering beneath their banter. “I have less than a year to live and I don’t know it,” Carey informs us via direct address at the end of the first scene, “by Christmas I will be dead.” We witness that year, 2017, with no small amount of heartbreak as Carey quietly orders her affairs and forges a new relationship with Spencer (Quentin Chisholm), a young actor recently arrived in the city who becomes the gay son she never had.

Under William Carden’s unflashy yet sturdy direction, the actors take ownership of these roles like they would on a long-running television series, giving us shades of realistic and deeply sympathetic humanity.

“Could you, maybe, um, not tell anyone I’d never read [The Age of Innocence],” Abby asks Carey, “I would die of embarrassment.” Goldman’s tightly clipped hair and eagerness to correct paint a vivid portrait of a consummate meritocrat struggling with the realization that a 4.0 GPA isn’t enough to get you a career as a writer.

Derambakhsh is more furtive, if only because Brittany recognizes Abby’s fragility and has no desire to break her. “I am an art monster,” she confesses to us, a writer who clocks her own impulse to turn everything she sees into a story but who still cannot kick the habit.

Exuding a gentle puppy dog enthusiasm, Chisholm really does feel like a young actor who just alighted from the Megabus with a suitcase and a prayer. Spencer’s relationship with Carey, who gently nudges him into becoming a reader who can appreciate a good martini, is a PSA about the importance of intergenerational friendship.

But it’s Zarish who gives the most memorable performance as a woman who has known death intimately from a young age (she moved to New York in the late 70s and all her friends were gay men) and is insistent on making a graceful exit. There are no operatic set pieces or maudlin tears in her performance, and that restraint makes her inevitable demise even more devastating.

Jessica Parks has designed them a cozy storefront set looking out on an idyllic West Village street scene, with Jill Nagle’s natural light streaming in through the upstage windows. The shelves are fully stocked with recognizable titles, allowing the audience to play “Where’s Waldo (Emerson)?” Suzanne Chesney costumes the actors in smart girl chic. And sound designer Nick Simone cushions up the scenes, broken up by month, with elegantly selected interstitial music.

Parts of The Bookstore strain credulity: When we first meet Spencer, he is taking refuge in the shop after suffering an assault in broad daylight (again, in the West Village) during which a group of guys called him a faggot. It’s a scene I could only envision with the assailants wearing crop tops and voguing on the way to the Christopher Street pier.

But the excellent performances help us to overlook the occasional authorial stretch. For both bibliophiles and lovers of slow-boil drama, The Bookstore is a fine selection.