Suspended

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

5 Stars

The title of Brooke Goldner's solo show suggested to me that I would be hearing a story about a kid sent home from boarding school, Goldner had something far more interesting in mind.

Suspended was presented for one night only as part of the United Solo Theater Festival’s 2026 season. The show is about being held in place, between childhood and adulthood, between grief and acceptance, between the person you are and the character you build.

The frame is an acting lesson with an assignment to create a character on the spot. When her smug British teacher demands to know who she is, Goldner mutters "a fuck-up" under her breath. The teacher seizes on the phrase and calls her that for the rest of the lesson. Goldner embraces the label referring to herself as "Fuck-Up" with a mix of affection and self-deprecation for the rest of the show. The teacher's prodding becomes the show's engine, each question sends Goldner into memories of babysitters, high school boyfriends, best friends, and family. These memories unfold in chapters introduced by titles scribbled on an old overhead projector.

The set is a cluttered bedroom shifting from her brother's room to her college dorm. The mess is the point, growing up like building a character means trying on versions of yourself and leaving the discarded ones on the floor or shoved under the bed. Goldner draws on her training in acting and writing to shape her personal history so deftly that the line between her art and her life disappears.

Every aspect of director Virginia Ogden’s production is thoughtfully executed with sound, lighting, and music cues used in unexpected ways. A theater vestibule suddenly transforms into a nightclub. When the Eagles’ “Peaceful Easy Feeling” plays, its sense of ease contrasts so sharply with the story’s unspoken tensions that the song becomes almost unbearable.

The show is confessional at heart; Judy Blume by way of the rehearsal room and often very funny. Like all good comedy it has real pain underneath.

Goldner began the piece as her senior thesis at Dartmouth a few years after her younger autistic brother died. He was a stoner and a self-taught musician, but Goldner admits she never took the time to really know him.

At one point she observes that once someone dies everything said about them is locked in a glass vault of careful kind things that can never be taken back. The show is her refusal to keep him there. She brings him back to life flawed, exasperating, and beloved.

The final confession lands with startling force turning the acting teacher’s demand for “a powerful moment” back on itself. Without giving too much away the show’s title and central theme come from her brother’s observation that a song should never end on a suspended chord, it leaves the tension unresolved. End there and the listener is left leaning forward, waiting for a resolution that never comes. We want our lives to resolve the same way, to make peace with our childhood selves, our mistakes, our fuckups, our unexpected losses. Life rarely obliges.

Brooke Goldner in Suspended never plays the resolving chord and she doesn't pretend to have found one. Like that bedroom it stays messy but out of what remains unresolved she makes something beautifully imperfect. An insightful witty writer and an accomplished actress she gives Suspended every reason to live beyond this stage.

Suspended

Starring: Brooke Goldner

Performed on November 3, 2026

at The 21st Annual United Solo Theatre Festival

October 19 – November 22, 2026

Theatre Row, 410 West 42nd Street, in Manhattan

Reviewer: Emily Lansbury