Tracy Letts' The Minutes Makes Its DC Premiere at Keegan Theatre

Tracy Letts, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright behind August: Osage County, has long demonstrated a gift for finding the rot lurking just beneath the surface of ordinary American life. His play The Minutes, now receiving its DC premiere at Keegan Theatre under the direction of Artistic Director Susan Marie Rhea, trains that same unflinching eye on something deceptively mundane: a small-town city council meeting. What begins as a dry comedy of bureaucratic absurdity gradually peels back into something far more unsettling — a pointed and timely reckoning with how communities construct, protect, and ultimately distort their own histories.

The Minutes at Keegan Theatre

The play is set in Big Cherry, a fictional mid-American town that was once Sioux Indian territory, and the action unfolds entirely within the wood-paneled walls of its council chamber. When the meeting convenes, the members work through the usual agenda — stolen bicycles, a proposed park fountain, a local heritage festival — with the breezy self-importance of people convinced their small world is of great consequence. The chamber itself, designed by Josh Sticklin, looms large over the proceedings, its Victorian grandeur and a prominent reproduction of Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's iconic "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" serving as a pointed visual metaphor for the mythology of American expansion.

Into this setting steps Mr. Peel, a newly elected dentist played with winning earnestness by Stephen Russell Murray, who arrives eager to serve but quickly becomes distracted by a conspicuous absence. One council seat sits empty — that of a Mr. Carp — and the minutes from the previous meeting, the official record that should explain everything, have mysteriously not been distributed. As Peel presses for answers, the council stonewalls him with practiced ease, and the comedy of municipal dysfunction slowly gives way to something more Kafkaesque and alarming.

The ensemble that surrounds Murray is uniformly strong, each actor inhabiting a distinct comic type with precision and commitment. Ray Ficca's Mayor Superba swaggers through the chamber with easy self-importance, while Barbara Klein's Ms. Innes insists on reading her lengthy civic sermon aloud to anyone who will listen. Timothy H. Lynch's gruff Mr. Oldfield and Katie McManus's medicated Ms. Matz can barely follow the proceedings, and Zach Brewster-Geisz's Mr. Assalone is quietly one of the play's best running jokes. Valerie Adams Rigsbee brings quiet efficiency and watchful reserve to the council clerk, Ms. Johnson, whose competence makes the missing minutes all the more suspicious. Rhea's direction keeps the 90-minute, no-intermission production coiled and purposeful, letting the text do its work without pushing for effect.

When the council's secret finally surfaces — through an unforgettable re-enactment of Big Cherry's founding mythology involving a local hero and the violent displacement of its Native inhabitants — Letts turns the screws with devastating effect. The play's conclusion doesn't offer easy answers or moral reassurance. It asks instead how far people will go to protect a comfortable lie, and how willingly a community will close ranks when inconvenient truths threaten the stories it has told about itself for generations. Written in 2017 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, The Minutes has only grown more urgent in the years since.

The Minutes runs through May 3, 2026, at The Keegan Theatre, located at 1742 Church Street NW in Washington, DC. Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00 pm, Sundays at 3:00 pm, and select Mondays and Wednesdays at 8:00 pm.