The Wanderers At Marylebone Theatre: Lives Entangled Between Truth and Imagination
Anna Ziegler’s play opens as two separate stories in Brooklyn: a secular, literary couple in the present and, decades earlier, a young Hasidic couple negotiating strict religious doctrine. As scenes accumulate, the link reveals itself as family, and the play becomes a study of inheritance, showing how choices echo across generations and how modern Jewish life in New York sits in tension with the Hasidic world that shaped it.
The cast is strong: Alexander Forsyth as Abe, Paksie Vernon as Sophie, Katerina Tannenbaum as Esther, Eddie Toll as Schmuli, and Anna Popplewell as Julia. Abe is a Pulitzer-winning novelist who slips into an emotional affair with a Hollywood actor, while the earlier timeline tracks his parents’ arranged marriage and Esther’s growing need for freedom.
The play folds these two narratives into one frame. The structure asks the audience to hold both stories and to notice how fiction and memory can nudge a life into new shapes, watching everyday decisions and the suffication of religious orthodoxy accumulate into real consequence. It is a portrait of a father who cannot see beyond what he has been told is right, and in clinging to this prescribed idea of virtue, he damages trust with his wife and with his child.
Characters write chapter titles, diagrams, and small sketches on the surface in white marker, so the stage turns into a living notebook. It is visually striking and thematically neat, effective, because it lets the two stories annotate one another in real time.
The Wanderers is smart theatre with heart. For anyone who likes plays that think and feel in equal measure, this is a production to watch and to talk about afterward. The play refuses to turn belief into a caricature. It shows how faith can comfort and also constrict, and how a son raised between worlds may repeat the very harms he resents.
