Orbiting Absence: “Mr. Wolf” at Road Less Traveled Theater

By Anthony Chase

Lauren Farrow as Theresa in Rajiv Joseph's "Mr. Wolf" at Road Less Traveled Theater

Rajiv Joseph's “Mr. Wolf” begins with a miracle and a question. A missing child has been found. What, then, becomes of the family that spent years orbiting her absence? Road Less Traveled Theater's production, directed by Peter Palmisano, explores that question with quiet precision and emotional force.

Theresa, the recovered girl, is played with haunting strength by newcomer Lauren Farrow. She was stolen as a three-year old by a man who called himself Mr. Wolf. He raised her in isolation, teaching her that she was chosen to decipher the cosmic order, locate God, and save humanity. When the play begins, Mr. Wolf is minutes from his death, the police have intervened, and the girl, now fourteen, will be returned to a family as shattered as it is grateful.

Kristin Bentley as Hana and Dave Hayes as Michael, parents as shattered as they are grateful, watch their newly recovered daughter (Lauren Farrow) sleep.

Joseph's premise sounds like the set-up for a thriller -- a girl raised in isolation by a captor obsessed with cosmic destiny -- but the play treats these events as human-scale tragedy. "Mr. Wolf" is less a crime story than a metaphysical one, asking how we rebuild meaning after catastrophe.

Theresa has never known the ordinary world; her father, Michael (Dave Hayes), and mother, Hana (Kristin Bentley), spent her lost years in separate forms of anguish. Emotionally driven, Michael's grief became obsession, his life narrowed to the project of finding his daughter. Hana's world broke apart; unable to function under uncertainty, she fled into the brutal pragmatism of self-preservation.

Lauren Farrow as Theresa and Camilla Maxwell as Julie in Rajiv Joseph's "Mr. Wolf" at Road Less Traveled Theater

Into this uneasy reunion steps Julie (Camilla Maxwell), Michael's new wife, herself a bereaved parent whose steadiness gives the story its most generous humanity. Palmisano's production excavates the grief beneath Joseph's metaphysics.

Palmisano stages the family's collision in overlapping realities, part domestic drama, part cosmic allegory. Lauren Farrow's Theresa suggests a being still half in orbit, a mind alive with numbers and galaxies yet unmoored among human faces. Her voice is measured but insistent, her gaze alternately piercing and detached.

This is a strong-willed survivor thrown into an entirely unfamiliar setting; the only introduction to the "real world" that Mr. Wolf offers her, minutes before she must confront its vastness, is a chocolate candy bar. When she repeatedly recalls the language of her captor, the effect is chilling, but these aren't affectations or defense mechanisms. They're the foundational language through which she understands existence itself. She allows the character's intellect to glimmer through her confusion without losing her essential strength. It's an assured debut from a young actor of clear promise.

Peter Horn as calm, polite, and unsettlingly sane Mr. Wolf.

Peter Horn plays Mr. Wolf, an astronomy professor with apocalyptic beliefs. The name itself invokes fairy tale predators, the wolf who stalks through forests, who wears sheep's clothing. But Horn's performance understands that real predators don't announce themselves with fangs and fur. Calm, polite, and unsettlingly sane, he evokes the unnerving charm often attributed to true monsters, the neighbor who, after his arrest for unthinkable atrocities, is described as a nice quiet guy who always kept to himself. His presence looms over the play like dark matter, felt more than seen, shaping every orbit of the story that follows.

Dave Hayes as Michael captures a father's logical pain distilled into an illogical situation. His effort to reason his way through emotional chaos is exacting and painful, and his silences prove as expressive as his reluctant speeches. Yet Hayes also conveys a devastating irony: finding his daughter has not ended his loss. Michael found her, but she doesn't need him, doesn't recognize him, cannot be who he needs her to be.

Kristin Bentley and Dave Hayes as parents in their separate forms of anguish.

Bentley's Hana, by contrast, explodes with volatile energy, her confidence barely concealing regret, guilt, and long-suppressed rage. Her outbursts burn with the tension of someone confronting not only her lost child but her own shame. Bentley reveals how Hana's methods, the very strategies that allowed her to function after losing her daughter, are exactly what prevent her from connecting to the person who has returned.

The production's anchor is Maxwell's Julie, who moves between empathy and self-suppression, experiencing the miracle of Theresa's return through the prism of her own irreversible loss. Existing outside the biological bond that simultaneously connects and constrains Theresa's parents, Julie becomes the bridge between worlds, the one figure capable of actually reaching the girl. Maxwell handles that irony with elegance, maintaining equilibrium while standing on the edge of grief, until she doesn't.

Part of what makes Julie's position so precarious is that Theresa has developed her own theology of loss. The girl insists, fiercely, that she figured out on her own that God is located where there is nothing. It's a survivor's claim to independent thought, but it also reveals what captivity has taught her: that absence itself is sacred. While her family spent years orbiting the void where she should have been, she was learning to locate divinity in emptiness, and remains blind to the fact that Julie's grief guards another sacred absence. When Theresa tramples that space with hurtful and socially inappropriate comments, Maxwell's eruption feels earned and necessary.

The play suggests that Theresa survived her captivity, in part through inherited artistic talent from her father Michael, whose weakness for mathematics stands in stark contrast to Mr. Wolf's cosmological obsessions. Joseph handles this carefully: the very thing linking her to her family also provided her with resources to endure what was done to her. Art becomes both inheritance and survival mechanism.

Appropriately, design plays a critical role in translating the play's cosmic metaphors into psychological ones. Collin Ranney's set, intersecting frames painted with galaxies by Anna Krempholtz, invokes both a child's toy theater and a planetarium. Katie Menke's projections fill the walls with slow-rotating constellations, a hypnotic and changing backdrop reminding us of the situation’s instability, and of our insignificance within the cosmos.

John Rickus's lighting sculpts these spaces, expertly transforming the stage into mundane living spaces, or into infinite voids. Kari Drozd's costumes subtly define the characters and chart their emotional distance.

Road Less Traveled Productions has shown a sustained commitment to Joseph’s work. He was their American Theater Master in 2022 when they staged a handsome production of "Guards at the Taj" and hosted an early reading of his play “Archduke,” which is now making its New York City debut. 

Palmisano's direction provides both fluidity and clarity. Mr. Wolf warns Theresa that the world will be loud. Palmisano lets the quiet moments breathe just long enough to feel dangerous before driving the pace forward with cinematic force.

The production's final moments, tender, uncertain, and radiant with possibility, suggest that no one truly escapes gravity, but we can, perhaps, learn to hold one another in its pull.

The production continues through December 14, 2025.

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