In Big Cherry, a fictional mid-American town that was once Sioux Indian territory, the weekly town council meeting begins routinely enough. Members nosh around the snack table, tick through an agenda of day-to-day issues — stolen bikes, parking spaces, public monuments — and offer congratulations to the high school football team, the Savages.
The Keegan Theatre’s outstanding production of Tracy Letts’ 2017 Pulitzer Prize–nominated play, The Minutes, ushers us into the closed-door meeting of this group of local burghers. Over 90 minutes, we move from their breezy, back-slapping opening banter down a rabbit hole where an increasingly cantankerous council fights to protect Big Cherry’s origin story: a story so jarring that it’s best to avoid mention of it in a review. The ride is both fiercely funny and totally horrifying. By the breathtaking end of this one-act play, Letts smartly reveals truths not only about Big Cherry but also about the myths that have fueled America’s expansion over 250 years, and the lengths people will go to avoid facing past truths.
Letts sketches the councilmen and women with comic precision, and under Keegan Artistic Director Susan Marie Rhea’s crisp direction, the cast inhabit their roles with glinting humor and glee. Throughout The Minutes, we’re treated to a master class in ensemble acting. Even their names land as jokes. Self-assured Mayor Superba (Ray Ficca) swaggers around the chamber with easy authority. Mr. Breeding (Theo Hadjimichael) snorts about “woke” language, while the self-absorbed Ms. Innes (Barbara Klein) insists on reading her long-winded civic sermon aloud. An unctuous Mr. Assalone, played by Zach Brewster-Geisz, repeatedly reminds the others that the final letter of his name is its own syllable. Timothy H. Lynch’s befuddled octogenarian, Mr. Oldfield, and Katie McManus’s highly medicated Ms. Matz can barely follow the proceedings. One chair, however, sits conspicuously empty: Mr. Carp’s.
Earnest newcomer Mr. Peel (Stephen Russell Murray) inquires about Carp. He is told matter-of-factly that Carp is no longer on the council. Looking for answers in last week’s minutes, Peel realizes that they have not been distributed. The clerk, Ms. Johnson (Valerie Adams Rigsbee), offers no answers, and the room closes ranks. Peel presses, his unease mounting. No one budges.
Instead, the Council pivots to items of civic pride, including a proposed statue of U.S. Army hero Sergeant Otto Pym, who supposedly saved a local white child from marauding Native Americans in 1872. As if in a trance, the entire council puts aside its petty differences to enact an unforgettable history lesson, one they all learned long ago in Big Cherry’s public schools.
All of this plays out in a wood-paneled, tall-windowed, chandelier-topped chamber that seems to reflect Big Cherry’s inflated sense of its own importance. On the wall behind Mayor Superba’s ample armchair, scenic designer Josh Sticklin has mounted a huge, garish reproduction of Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s famous mid-19th-century painting “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way,” a perfect visual expression of Manifest Destiny. It may feel dated until we realize that a gigantic version of Leutze’s work still hangs outside the House of Representatives today. What better metaphor for the way national origin stories make their way down into local storytelling, burying truths in a haze of patriotism?
Letts seeds the first half of the play with hints of rot beneath the humor, aided by Dominic DeSalvio’s lighting design, which includes several eerie flickerings and blackouts. Of course, we will eventually learn what’s recorded in the minutes, but nothing quite prepares us for the play’s final turn. Big Cherry’s pride relies on a willful racism that is truly breathtaking.
With that revelation (which I won’t reveal here; you need to see it for yourself), we’re invited to consider how inconvenient truths are erased from official histories and how “alternative facts” take their place. Many of us despair; fewer, perhaps, are willing to relinquish the privileges resulting from centuries of pillage. Letts’ brilliant play doesn’t offer answers — but he does pose a pointed question: how much effort would many of us make to set the record straight? That was an important query back in 2017 when the play was written. It is even more urgent today.
Running Time: 90 minutes with no intermission.
The Minutes plays through May 3, 2026, at The Keegan Theatre, 1742 Church St NW, Washington, DC, with performances Thursdays-Saturdays at 8:00 pm, Sundays at 3:00 pm, and select Mondays and Wednesdays at 8:00 pm. Tickets are $55 ($44 for seniors 62+ and students/under 25) and available online.
SEE ALSO:
Keegan Theatre announces cast and creatives for ‘The Minutes’ (news story, March 12, 2026)
