Bronwen Sharp
More than once, Jodie Comer’s character Tessa Ensler declares “This is me” in Suzie Miller’s searing one-woman Broadway play, Prima Facie (Golden Theatre, booking to June 18). The declaration resonates because Tessa is in no way any kind of stereotype—of a lawyer, a young woman, or victim of rape. She is a complex me, who Comer—in an astonishingly acted monolog—makes the center of a striking piece of theater directed by Justin Martin. In London earlier this month, Comer won the Olivier Award for Best Actress for her performance, while the play won Best New Play—and both must surely be Tony Award favorites here.
Bar one pause in the intermission-less 100 minutes, Killing Eve star Comer is on stage throughout, inhabiting Tessa and a gallery of other characters—including her mother, best friend, and rapist. But most stunning is her presentation of Tessa who both goes through so much, and seems so much. The play is a blunt polemic against a patriarchal legal system weighted against female victims of sexual violence; Comer’s performance and Martin’s staging deepens the text into a one of the most electrifying pieces of theater on Broadway this season.
“Prima facie” means “on the face of it” in Latin, and the play is an indictment of what that means in terms of the law and legal process itself—and how it misses so much, and also, when it comes to Tessa, an interrogation of character that at first seems a simple hero to root for: the working class girl made good.