SALT LAKE CITY — For the weeks leading up to seeing Salt Lake Acting Company or SLAC’s opening show of 2025, I would pronounce the show I was seeing as the “Robber-Tassy”. This was incorrect. In the play’s opening scene, when the protagonist is discussing going to Ireland, I then realized it was about her – Roberta, being out at Sea. Still wrong.
It was my brother who joined me, however, who pointed out that quotes from Homer in the text indicated that this was Roberta’s Odyssey or “Robertassey”. The premiere of Kathleen Cahill’s The Robertassey was a nuanced and multi-layered story about grappling with the grief of lost things, something we are all destined to experience poignantly as we live in and engage with the world around us.
World Premiere
Cahill, whose work has been produced six times at SLAC writes in her playwrights note that this story has its origins in her own misadventures with lost luggage in Ireland courtesy of Aer Lingus. She points out that through her encounters with Irish folk that, “they love love language, and I love the way they treat fantasy like it was just a less ordinary part of reality.” This is a wonderful way to describe Cahill’s new work. It demonstrates a remarkable love of language and blends fantasy and reality closely.
This is most noticeable in moments when Roberta sees her father’s phntasm in both sleeping and waking sequences that weave in and out of the narrative. The story features eight characters, but four actors and the text has some fun self-referential moments in the intentional blending of these characters together through the actors who play them.
Acting and Directing
Anne Louise Brings, who played Roberta, was engaging from the start. Her angst was tempered with banter that she clearly enjoys alongside Heidi Hackney*, playing her sister Carol. The two had a rapport that felt generational and their circular arguments about issues they seemed to have discussed ad nauseum lent authenticity to their characters dealing with grief and family dynamics. Brings in particular brought a dynamic range to key moments such as learning about her family’s move, her relationship with Aemon and the story’s conclusion. There were opening night hiccups and jitters from the cast in the opening scenes, but by the time the play was in full swing, the strength of the cast was evident.
Eric Sciotto* who played a pair of Aer Lingus co-workers, Garth and Aemon, was electric. Really great acting happens when you can take good, or even middling text, and elevate it. The text here was great, but I never thought I would see a monologue about the color and contents of airline baggage that would have me laughing in stitches. It took the trope of an exaggerated deat scene, but somehow applied it to a sexy poetry interpretation of checked bags. It was one of those performances that I spent the rest of the weekend trying to explain to people badly because it Iiked it so much. It was hilarious, and at the risk of over-hyping it, I already know I’m planning to write about this in my “best of UTBA 2025” contributions. Sciotto elevated a character that could have been simple to being exquisite.
The strength of these two is buoyed by Hackney and Darryl Stamp who is, in various ways, the apparition of Roberta’s father in her odyssey. They play straight parts that give lots of reactive material to Brings’ portrayal of Roberta. Direction from Penelope Caywood and Hannah Keating allowed this tight ensemble to move major emotional shifts fluidly and handle complex situations with craftsmanship. This was a piece that knew exactly what it was and who it spoke to, and did so in a way that brought a thoughtfulness to key moments of SLAC’s show.
Design
I loved the costume design from La Beene that allowed for some incredible quick changes, and a great deal of storytelling through clothing. Roberta is comedically compelled to change clothes by an saleswoman who not only puts new clothes on but takes her current ones off, forcing her to be in a new space. The costumes allowed for an intimate, though not explicit, romantic interlude, and established clearly professions, statuses, and emotional arcs.
I was also quite impressed with Gage Williams’** scenic design which utilized wall changes, abstracted pieces of luggage used as tables, and other creative tools to establish many locations and shift between them with ease. I wasn’t certain that the sequence at the end where a man row’s a boat was intended to be funny or not, but the audience on Friday night was abuzz with joy from a night of excellent storytelling that it seemed to be effectively humorous.
Conclusion
New works always feel risky. To produce them is to trust that an audience will see in the text what the theatre makers see in it. It is to hope that patrons will trust the quality of works done enough to take a chance on this one as well. As an audience member, the only previous chance to engage with this work was through SLAC’s New Play Sounding Series, but even that doesn’t guarantee it will translate from staged reading to fully mounted well
SLAC’s production of Cahill’s The Robertassey was a success. I would absolutely go again, and I loved thinking about the story this weekend. There are things lost and things found when you turn your back to the future and face your past. Grief, human connection, and laughing at attempting to recreate the magic of Sciotto’s passion for luggage are things I’ll carry with me for a long time.
These reviews are made possible by a grant from the Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts, and Parks program.
