Mike (Connor Wilson) and Mandy (West Duchovny) form a bond in Scott Organ’s Diversion (photo by Edward T. Morris)
DIVERSION
The Barrow Group Performing Arts Center
520 Eighth Ave. between Thirty-Sixth & Thirty-Seventh Sts., ninth floor
Tuesday- Sunday through January 11, $49
www.barrowgroup.org
“If you’re gonna take care of people, you have to take care of yourself first,” Emilia (Tricia Alexandro) tells Mandy (West Duchovny) in Scott Organ’s potent Diversion, one of the best plays of 2025. It’s a maxim that rings true both on- and offstage.
The show unfolds at the Barrow Group Performing Arts Center, on the ninth floor of the modernized hundred-year-old high-rise office tower at 520 Eighth Ave., where ticket holders have to display their ID and have their picture taken at the front desk, not that different from entering a hospital these days. Once upstairs, some audience members have to walk right through Edward T. Morris’s intimate set, a nurses’ break room at a hospital’s ICU, in order to get to their seats, adding to the immersive feel of the powerful narrative.
It’s the holiday season, shortly after Thanksgiving, and the nurses’ manager, Bess (Thaïs Bass-Moore), announces to her staff that someone has been stealing, or “diverting,” Oxycontin and fentanyl patches; an investigator named Josephine Holden (Colleen Clinton) has been sent by the feared Fortune Consultants to uncover the perpetrator. A former nurse herself — a fact she uses to try to gain the nurses’ trust — Jo is an unwelcome intruder in their private space, where they take much-needed respite from treating seriously ill patients fighting for their lives in the ICU.
At first, the stern Bess tells her team of four nurses that if it is any one of them, they need to come clean and that if they are an addict, she will make sure to get them help and not notify the police. Bess’s boss, Cunningham, has placed them all under suspicion: the hypercritical Amy (DeAnna Lenhart), a long-established nurse with back pain who is married to a cop; the younger Mike (Connor Wilson), a single father with a special-needs kid; newcomer Mandy, who is living with a sketchy boyfriend; and Emilia, a sterling nurse who ran the triage during the Covid pandemic and whose husband just moved out after they were unable to conceive.
When everyone denies being involved in the thefts, Bess admonishes them: “Look. I gave everyone a chance. A very fair chance. And whoever did this decided instead to tell me and all their peers here to fuck off. And I will accordingly offer them the same respect when I find them out. This is an embarrassment. And I gave you all a chance. And whoever it is didn’t want to deal with me so they can deal with the cops. Cunningham wants a head on a pike. I will deliver that head.”
Amy and Emilia have worked together the longest and are close. When they start looking into who the culprit might be, Emilia says, “You’re my Watson?” Amy replies, “Or perhaps I’m your Holmes.” Meanwhile, Mike and Mandy bond as the probe deepens and New Year’s Eve approaches with Jo determined to get to the bottom of it.
Bess (Thaïs Bass-Moore) turns to Emilia (Tricia Alexandro) to try to solve a mystery in powerful play from the Barrow Group (photo by Edward T. Morris)
Diversion is expertly directed by Seth Barrish (The New One, Death, Let Me Do My Show), getting the most out of the relatively small, confined set, while Organ’s (17 Minutes, Phoenix) dialogue is sharp and on point, with a poetic flow and no wasted words. Solomon Weisbard keeps the lights dim, making the audience feel as if it’s in the room with the nurses, enhanced by Geoff Grimwood’s sound, which incorporates hospital noises into the mix. Gina Ruiz’s blue-scrub costumes are offset by Jo’s wardrobe and a late surprise.
Alexandro (Seven Deadly Sins), Bass-Moore (Any Ordinary Day), Clinton (Muswell Hill), Lenhart (The Fear Project), and Wilson (Stone Don’t Lie) are excellent as believable men and women who have sacrificed some of life’s inherent joys in order to help others, at the risk of personal health and, as Jo notes, “moral injury.” In her off-Broadway debut, Duchovny (the daughter of David Duchovny and Téa Leoni) sparkles as Mandy, a young woman still figuring out who she is and where she belongs. She may not be the smartest of the group — she regularly does not understand certain words or know various aphorisms, telling Emilia in a charmingly hesitant, choppy manner, “You’re like good at quotes” — but she might have the biggest heart. It’s a complex and tender performance that bodes well for her future.
“I will do all in my power to maintain and elevate the standard of my profession,” reads part of the Florence Nightingale Pledge, which is referred to several times in the play and is something all six characters took upon their pinning when they became a nurse. “I will zealously seek to nurse those who are ill wherever they may be and whenever they are in need.” It is an oath they all take seriously and defines why they have chosen that field. “Why did you take this job?” Emilia asks Mandy early on, sarcastically adding, “The vacations? The fact that your schedule is flexible? The fact that there is always work?”
Nurses who are overworked and underappreciated is an age-old dilemma, one that Organ subtly notes by having the clock in the break room stuck at 2:47, as if time doesn’t change anything. (It’s also a reference to how they are essentially on call 24/7.) It takes more than just banging pots and pans and whistling and cheering at seven o’clock to celebrate devoted health-care workers, and Diversion goes a long way in showing that.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]