Exit Strategy at RLTP
- Anthony Chase
- 2 hours ago
- 8 min read
Review by ANTHONY CHASE
With Exit Strategy, Road Less Traveled Productions has entered into a substantive relationship with playwright Ike Holter. After the richly entertaining success of his Mephistophelean tale of horror, The Light Fantastic, in 2024, the company has now turned to the earlier play that put Holter on the map. It proves to be an inspired choice, not only theatrically but institutionally: this production marks the return of artistic director Scott Behrend to active duty after a prolonged, life‑threatening illness. When he stepped out onto the stage to welcome the audience on opening night, the ovation he received was not polite gratitude but something closer to communal relief. It is fitting that his first project back is a play about people who refuse to surrender.
In this case, the resolute entity is a beleaguered urban high school, but the subject is larger: what happens when ordinary people decide, together, to stop cooperating with the forces of expediency and indifference.
Behrend directs Exit Strategy with the assistance of Dwight Barlow, and what they have mounted is a darkly funny and emotionally direct production that never loses sight of what is at stake. Holter takes us to a crumbling Chicago public high school on the chopping block; the plot tracks how a small group of teachers and one galvanized student respond when they are told the building will be closed at the end of the year.
The script is profane, quick‑witted, and structurally shrewd. It begins in bureaucratic humiliation and grief, then mutates, almost before we notice, into something like a siege drama. Not a siege of soldiers and barricades, but of conscience: a handful of teachers and one student boxed in by policies, figuring out how much risk they are willing to share and whether they can stand together long enough to matter.
This production leans into both the hurt and the humor, trusting the audience to keep up. Don’t expect tidy endings or a happily ever after.
Collin Ranney’s set does a lot to make the siege feel real. The stage is dominated by the faculty room of weary “Tumbldn High,” rendered with unnerving realism. We recognize those dingy institutional walls and the tired furniture of a room that has endured generations of increasingly demoralizing faculty meetings and gripe sessions.
Hyper‑realism onstage can, of course, be deceptive. Lovingly detailed sets have sunk more than a few plays when they become an inert diorama. Ranney’s design does not fall into that trap. As he did for RLTP’s production of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Our Lady of 121st Street, he splits the stage, here placing the faculty room stage right and the exterior of the building, off to the side, stage left. The faculty room becomes a war room, the place where a little coalition is born, splinters, and reforms as they decide, in fits and starts, to stop being bystanders to their own erasure.
The exterior, with its imposing doorway, is a reminder of former grandeur and recent neglect, a post war era when the pride of a victorious nation and a baby boom inspired huge investment in public education. This dignified façade is now the public face of the fight: the meeting place of opposing sides, and the visual reminder that the real battle is between this small community and the world outside. It also becomes a mystical space, and even a literally haunted space. (Incidentally, Ranney also designed the marvelously haunted set for Holter's The Light Fantastic).
The evening begins before the actors speak, with projections of archival television footage. Martin Luther King, Jr. speaks about the importance of education in our formative years; the images then unspool into news coverage of school closings, including, pointedly, Buffalo. It is a simple but effective frame. Holter wrote Exit Strategy in the wake of catastrophic school closures in Chicago; RLTP’s choice to connect the play explicitly to our own local history reminds us that this is not an exotic policy debate from somewhere else. The question of which children are worth investing in, and which buildings are worth saving, is placed in the lap of the Road Less Traveled audience. So are even larger questions.
At the center of the story is Ricky, the school’s young vice principal, played by Sean Ryan. Known primarily for his musical theater leads, Ryan here makes a striking “legit” debut. His Ricky is a man wedged between his compulsion to please and the institutional cruelty he is tasked with delivering. Behrend and Ryan wisely let him start in the register of familiar, slightly oily administrative niceness: the sort of man who smooths meetings with pastries and platitudes, hoping sugar and small talk will make bad news go down easier. Over the course of the evening, we watch that strategy fail him, and Ryan is very good at showing the panic that seeps in as his toolbox empties. When he finally stumbles toward something like social activism, it feels less like a heroic awakening than like a man propelled into courage from a cannon.
The play’s inciting event arrives in the opening scene. Ricky has been meeting with the faculty, one by one, to tell them the bad news. Pam is the last one on his list. Diane DiBernardo gives an astonishing performance in the role.
Pam is a dedicated, no‑nonsense career teacher who has quite simply run out of patience: with the system, with euphemism, with men like Ricky who think good manners constitute moral action. Holter has written her as an English teacher, and DiBernardo makes that detail count: Pam deploys words with precision. She knows what they cost. In their single, extended scene, she cuts through every one of Ricky’s evasions, including the chocolate cake he has placed in the break room as a kind of sugary shield, like the lump of sugar that used to accompany a polio vaccine. She calmly notes that she pulled the same trick when she had to tell her child the family dog was dead. Her advice is brutal and exactly right: rip the bandage off. The scene sets not only the tone but the moral key of the evening. DiBernardo never begs for our sympathy and thereby earns it.
But as quickly as we become invested in Pam, Holter changes directions. It’s a switch worthy of Alfred Hitchcock – a reference I can’t explain without giving away the plot. Pam may name the wound, but the other teachers show us its depth.
David Mitchell’s Arnold is an embittered veteran, heavily involved in union and city politics. Mitchell plays him less as a blowhard than as a man whose idealism has been sanded into cynicism without ever entirely disappearing. When Arnold speaks about negotiations and betrayals, Mitchell gives the sense of a mind that has read too many contracts and endured too many disappointments; his bitterness is detailed, not generalized. This is not a stock “angry union guy.”
Indeed, Holter has populated his play with a roster of “types,” but none is caricature. Every person has complexity, secrets, regrets, and internal dignity. What the play tracks, and this production honors, is how those misfit types -- union man, true believer, burnout, idealist, kid -- learn to occupy the same moral room, if not always the same tactical one.
Alex Garcia’s Luce is, on first encounter, the most outwardly cheerful of the faculty, a man whose leisure pursuits and pop‑culture enthusiasms seem to give his life most of its color. Garcia leans into that warmth and humor, but he (and Behrend) never let Luce slide into mere comic relief. Behind the jokes and the stories is a firmly held moral compass. We gradually understand that, behind the scenes, he is Ricky’s confidant and conscience, the person who calls him out and holds him up in equal measure. Garcia’s performance makes that dynamic believable; you can see why Ricky relies on him, and you can see the cost.
As Sadie, a motivated and self-confident teacher, Gabriella McKinley gives a performance that is both volatile and grounded. Sadie is radical and combustible, with a fierce loyalty to the school and to her students that makes her temper not just understandable but necessary. McKinley fashions a person with layered motivations: flashes of bravado, flashes of doubt, and an undercurrent of exhaustion familiar to anyone who has continued to work on a lost cause.
Lissette DeJesús‑Wrafter brings a luminous ordinariness to Jania, the special education teacher. Jania is weary yet idealistic, devoted to students who are, even within this already neglected institution, at additional risk of being overlooked. DeJesús‑Wrafter’s work is so natural that it often feels as if we are eavesdropping on spontaneous conversation rather than crafted dialogue. Seemingly sharing a common background with her students, note how deftly Holter drops Jania's alma mater into the discussion, subtly adding complexity to her true relationship to privilege.
Then there is Donnie, the student whose presence jolts the play out of its despairing adult loop. Steven Maiseke, previously seen in town as more dignified figures -- Fred in Alleyway’s A Christmas Carol, or as Ralph Paton and John Parker the butler in Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, for instance -- here surprises as a bright and rebellious teenager who refuses to accept the planned death of his school. Donnie hacks the school website, retooling it into a fundraising platform. Maiseke has the charisma and restless energy the role demands, and he skillfully lets us see the vulnerability under the swagger. His scenes with Ricky and the faculty make clear that any progress they achieve is not the work of a lone savior, adult or student, but the messy by‑product of people finally listening to one another and taking shared responsibility.
Katie Menke’s sound design and Maura Price’s costumes knit the world together. Price communicates character through the clothes these characters wear to work. From Ricky’s natty neckties to Arnold’s worn-out shirts, you can read who has been in the system too long, who still irons their ideals into their clothing, who has already half left. Menke’s soundscape bridges the faculty room and the world beyond its walls.
In Chicago, a decade ago, Exit Strategy hit a nerve in the immediate aftermath of massive public school closures. In Buffalo today, it resonates in a different but no less pointed way, and Holter's theme remains clear without ever feeling didactic.
While ultimately optimistic, the play refuses easy victories. Even when the faculty and students manage to mount resistance, we are aware of the larger system arrayed against them, and of the way their alliances, however fragile, change what is possible inside that building. What Behrend’s production captures especially well is the ways in which small acts of courage and cowardice accumulate. Each tiny choice either shores up the building or helps dismantle it. As a piece of theater, this Exit Strategy is smartly paced, visually coherent, and exquisitely acted. As the herald of Scott Behrend’s return, it is heartening. And as a comment on how individuals can stand up to unjust authority, it is timely.
The production continues through March 22nd. Call 716-629-3069 or visit RESERVATIONS@ROADLESSTRAVELEDPRODUCTIONS.ORG for tickets.