“Here we go. Here comes the sober. I hate this part, when the dam breaks and the questions come pouring in: How long was the blackout? Hours? Days? How did I get this cut? …”
Those words are spoken by Josh, protagonist of Jake Brasch’s new play, The Reservoir, at Atlantic Theater Company (February 5 through March 15). Josh is a young, gay, alcoholic NYU student who finds himself back in his hometown of Denver, Colorado, with no memory of how he got there. At the top of the play, he speaks those lines both to himself and to the audience.
The Reservoir is a semi-autobiographical dramedy. But just how “semi” isn’t something the playwright is fixated on. To some extent, Josh is definitely Jake Brasch’s alter ego. Like his on-stage counterpart, Brasch was a young alcoholic who wound up back in Denver, where he concentrated on achieving sobriety and reconnected with his grandparents. In a recent phone interview, however, Brasch made it clear that he and Josh are definitely not one and the same. He has mixed feelings when people conflate him with his fictional creation.
“In some of these interviews, sometimes, it’s ‘How does it feel to see yourself up there?’ It doesn’t really feel that way to me. It feels like, yes, a lot of the emotions [expressed in the play] are true even when the facts aren’t, but I also think there are universal things that are going on in every family, right? This play is about addiction and Alzheimer’s, which are two diseases that have touched literally every single family that I know.”
Nanas and grampas
Brasch knew from the beginning of the writing process that the play would have a particular intergenerational theme–that it would explore the relationship between grandparents and grandchild. After surfacing in Denver, Brasch’s Josh gets to know, more deeply than ever before, all four of his grandparents, and they’re a diverse lot.
Josh’s paternal grandparents–tough Beverly and jokey, libido-driven “Shrimpy”–are Jewish and free-spoken. The deeply Christian maternal grandparents could hardly be more different from the paternals. Irene is sweet, warm, and loving. Her husband, Hank, is conservative in his personal interactions and, presumably, in his politics as well. What they all share is love and concern for Josh. Plus, they’re all either battling dementia or fearful of having it touch them.
When I learned about the play’s scenario, it struck me how seldom American playwrights have dealt in a big way with grandchild/grandparent relationships. Brasch told me he was similarly surprised.
“There’s often a grandparent,” he noted. “A grandparent who’s wheeled out in the big, sprawling family play. But I haven’t seen much that focuses primarily on those relationships.”
The “reservoir” of the title has partly to do with Denver’s Cherry Creek Reservoir, where the opening sequence of the play takes place. But it’s also a metaphor for the idea of “Cognitive Reserve”: the human brain’s capacity to compensate when memory has been impaired. It’s something that both alcohol-damaged Josh and his aging grandparents want desperately. Shrimpy refers to it as “brain insurance.” Josh, at heart a fixer-upper, rallies his elders to join him in a memory restoration/preservation effort. Whether it involves a trip to the art museum or eating inordinate amounts of spinach, Josh leads the way, even when the grands are hesitant. Through it all he remains vulnerable when it comes to maintaining his sobriety.
The out-of-towners
The Reservoir marks Brasch’s New York debut as a professional playwright, but he explained that the play has already had a significant production history: “I’m extremely lucky to be afforded a privilege that very few playwrights have nowadays, which is to have [pre-NYC] productions out of town.”
The genesis of the play happened when he pitched an idea to Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Alfred P. Sloan Project, which commissions theatrical works that incorporate science- and technology-related themes. His proposal was a mere one-page submission presenting the idea for a play dealing with dementia science, but the Sloan Project accepted it. Brasch wrote the play during the pandemic, which, he says, partly explains its inherent strangeness: “The way the play uses [actors’] bodies and the way it thinks of space and the mind and this ‘reservoir metaphor’ that’s carried throughout … is pretty wacky.”
Among other things, this play helped Brasch get into the playwriting program at Juilliard. Its first presentation was at the 2023 Colorado New Play summit, which was followed by a full production in the winter of 2025 at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. This was the first of three related productions, the others being at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta and Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. All three were directed by Shelley Butler. Meanwhile, a separate production was staged at Berkeley Rep in California, with a different director. Even during rehearsals for the Atlantic staging–with Butler still directing but a new cast in place–Brasch has continued to fine-tune the script.
He’s beyond delighted with the four actors now taking on the role of the grandparents: Caroline Aaron (Beverley), Chip Zien (Shrimpy), Mary Beth Peil (Irene), and Peter Maloney (Hank).
“This cast is so special, with these four absolute legends of the theatre,” he said. “I know I’ll be sharing stories from the [rehearsal] room in 40 years, which is thrilling.”
He added of the play: “I joke that it’s a two-hour-long movement piece for four senior citizens and a twink.”
The “twink”–Josh– is now portrayed by Noah Galvin (Dear Evan Hansen, Waitress). Brasch marveled at Galvin’s ability to be simultaneously “technically precise” and “emotionally available” in the role. Rounding out the New York cast are Heidi Armbruster and Matthew Saldivar, both of whom play multiple roles.
The Atlantic production is co-produced with Ensemble Studio Theatre and the Sloan Project. In essence, this illustrates a procession from one-page pitch to full fruition.
All about the funny
Brasch now has a number of other writing projects lined up with various theatre companies. He’s also slated to appear onstage himself soon, with his friend and fellow playwright, Nadja Leonhard-Hooper, in one of their “filthy epic musicals.” The two writers comprise a two-person band called “American Sing-Song” (“A.S.S.”), which will perform the musical Hole! at Joe’s Pub March 9-12, in an already sold-out run. Hole! is about parishioners in Nebraska who avoid being snagged up to the heavens during the Rapture by inserting butt plugs.
While playgoers shouldn’t expect that sort of broad farcical tone from The Reservoir, they should also not count on a deadly serious night in the theatre from Brasch, a playwright who made his living over the course of a decade as a birthday clown:
“In my family, the most important thing is humor. We cope through humor; we evade through humor. We process the world through humor. If we don’t have humor, we cannot survive. I think that’s a Jewish thing. And I think that that’s a thing that this play embraces wholeheartedly. And for folks who might think, Oh, God. A play about addiction and Alzheimer’s? I don’t know if I can deal with that, this is a play that thoroughly and deeply engages with those two things in a way that I believe … will make them laugh … and will make them say, ‘Yeah, me too–I’ve been through that as well.’”
