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  • Desdemona Chiang

Most reviews of 25 Saints dwell on its first few seconds, when playwright Joshua Rollins lays out his story's awful stakes. The lights come up on the interior of a run-down shack, cluttered with gas masks and other telltale meth-making gear. A reggae version of John Denver's "Country Roads" plays for a few quiet bars before the door bangs open and four people charge through: two young men carrying a sheriff's deputy, and a screaming young woman. They're all panicked, shouting, and covered in blood. The young men wrestle with the wounded deputy before shoving him into a large wooden chest and beating him with a hammer until he stops moving. They slam the lid closed and sit on it, panting. One turns to the other and says: "So. Now what?"

That question is the rest of the play—Rollins could've used Now What? as an alternate title. The three young people deliberate about what to do (burn the body or sink it in the lake? Cook one last batch of meth to pay off their debts and skip town? Run immediately?), giving Rollins time to fill us in on who they are, how they got here, and the corrupt Appalachian world they're trapped in. In fact, 25 Saints is almost all exposition, which is the play's essential weakness—but the tensions are high and the lead performances are urgent, making that flaw easy to overlook.

The central presence in 25 Saints is actually an absence—a young man who racked up major debts with local meth kingpins, knocked up his girlfriend, and blew up a meth lab before disappearing.

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