Review: What Happened Was…, Corey Stoll and Cecily Strong Have a Very Awkward Date

At the top of the off-Broadway revival of Tom Noonan’s What Happened Was…, now performing at the Minetta Lane Theatre under the banner of Audible and TOGETHER, Cecily Strong carefully places a gorgeous red velvet cake on a stand. Never has an actor gazed more hopefully upon a gâteau, its thick layer of frosting promising a sweet end to a perfect evening. And we immediately know that whatever transpires over the next 80 minutes couldn’t possibly live up to the expectations set by this ostentatious baked good.

Strong plays Jackie, an executive assistant at a Manhattan law firm. She has finally mustered the courage to invite Michael (Corey Stoll), a handsome paralegal, to dinner at her studio apartment. But the nerves are evident on both sides from the moment he crosses the threshold.

She offers to take his trenchcoat and he declines, gawkily wearing it through pre-dinner drinks in case he needs to make a quick escape. She frantically microwaves leftover seafood, which makes Michael wretch just hearing the word. When she tells a joke that doesn’t quite land, he points at her and says, “That’s funny,” like an extraterrestrial finally understanding the concept of humor. They are not off to a good start.

Noonan, who died in February, displays a keen understanding of the theater of dating: how men puff up their bios like scrawny teenagers flexing in front of a bathroom mirror, and how women laugh a little too hard at their lame jokes to support the delusion. “You’re so funny,” Jackie tells Michael, not from anything he said but from the thought of a low-hanging joke he declined to pluck. And then there are the lulls in the conversation, gaps that would almost certainly be filled by one or both characters peering into their phones were this play set in 2026.

But What Happened Was… was originally produced off-off-Broadway in 1992 and subsequently turned into an independent film in 1994, meaning our two characters cannot escape into a digital fantasy but must sit with each other, the stench of their curdling dreams wafting about them.

Noonan’s depiction of the lies we tell others (and ourselves) feels as fresh as ever in this razor-sharp staging from director Ian Rickson, which acknowledges the play as a period piece while emphasizing that ways it continues to resonate.

The set (by Brett J. Banakis and Christine Jones) makes good use of the exposed brick of the Minetta Lane to create a loft apartment, with racks of clothing stage left and a steamer trunk acting a coffee table in front of a convertible loveseat. Kaye Voyce’s costumes make it clear that both characters came straight from the office, Stoll’s necktie resembling a polite noose. Lighting designer Japhy Weideman charts Jackie’s struggle to strike the appropriate mood. He collaborates particularly well with sound designer Mikaal Sulaiman during an extended passage in which Jackie reads the first chapter of a gruesome children’s story she has been writing (both characters claim to be unrecognized writers) with notes of campfire tension rising almost imperceptibly beneath Strong’s voice.

A natural comedian but an even better actor, Strong commits fully and sincerely to her reading of the story about a woman born into tragic circumstances who finds herself working as a topless go-go dancer. It gets the most laughs of the night and is certain to have relisten value in the eventual audio play. Stoll, who plays his cards close to his chest in a remarkably restrained performance, cannot help but take a gulp of cognac and bring his hand to his cheek as he listens.

Stoll and Strong play off each other brilliantly to conjure this perfect storm of awkwardness, with both characters silently weighing how much of their true selves they want to reveal. “I knew when you didn’t have a girlfriend that there was a reason,” Jackie says in the play’s most cutting monologue, “because we all are where we are because we want to be there.”

New York City is the third, invisible character in the play, a siren beckoning ambitious young dreamers, most of whom will be devoured by the machine. “There were so many things that I wanted to do with my life, but I’m so far behind now I’ll never catch up,” Michael admits. “I wish somebody would just tell me what to do.” It’s a sentiment I suspect many in the audience privately share.

Audible and TOGETHER should be commended for mounting this first-class revival of a play that shouldn’t be as obscure as it is.