Ed Schmidt stands behind a table covered with 27 ordinary objects — a Bible, a baseball glove, a one-eared Mr. Potato Head, a heavily annotated copy of The Catcher in the Rye — and reconstructs the life of Edward O'Connell, a retired high school English teacher who died at 73. The audience picks which object comes next. No two performances are the same. There are over ten octillion possible orderings, and tonight, this group of 25 strangers in the back of an East Village bookstore got ours.
It's a deceptively simple premise that lands with surprising emotional weight. Schmidt's writing is deeply literary, each monologue a polished short story in miniature that feels written to be read as much as performed. The standout of our night was the Catcher in the Rye: Schmidt delivering a dead man's defense of Salinger with so much quiet conviction that 25 strangers in a bar stopped breathing.
What struck me most is how the format mirrors the way we actually experience a life. Not as a clean narrative arc, but as fragments, objects, half-remembered moments that only add up to something when you step back. Whether Edward O'Connell was a real man or Schmidt's invention almost doesn't matter. He feels achingly real, precisely because Schmidt resists the urge to make him extraordinary. This is an ordinary man's life laid out on a table, and that's what makes it powerful. The gap between how we actually live and how stories usually frame living: Edward sits right in that gap.
The randomness is both the show's greatest strength and its only real cost. Our audience happened to pick three or four objects in a row that unlocked only short, light anecdotes, and those were the only moments my attention drifted. A different sequence might have been devastating. I suppose that's the charm and the risk of leaving so much to chance. You're not just watching a show, you're shaping it, and some shapes are more dramatic than others.
It's also a testament to Schmidt as a performer that he held 25 people in rapt attention for 95 minutes inside a bar not designed for theater. Book Club Bar is my partner's old local bookstore (they know him by name) and this was the first show they've ever hosted. It felt right: intimate, unrehearsed in the best sense, quintessentially New York. This is Off-Off-Off-Broadway at its finest, the kind of experience that reminds me why I love this city. The run is nearly sold out through March, but if you can get a ticket, get one.