There’s no elaborate stage work in ALL NIGHTER, the new play now running at New York’s MCC Theater Space. There are no small parts either—just five leads, a group of young women sitting at a table on campus during their last week of college for 95 minutes. No intermission. They’re attempting to pull, as the title suggests, one last all nighter to wrap their final assignments and toast to years spent living in their shared apartment, binge-drinking and stepping on each other’s toes, occasionally too hard to ignore.
Throughout the play, the initially nostalgic comedy devolves into a simmering drama and eventual all-out brawl as the women excavate topics few young adults can adequately process. What toll does it take to face an abusive ex in the dining hall over four long years? How do the tight-knit friendships that sustain us also hold us back?
Young playwright Natalie Margolin, along with director Jaki Bradley and actor-producer Ben Platt, rounded up a cast sure to draw the very crowd she dreamed up in ALL NIGHTER to the MCC. There’s teen drama regular Kristine Froseth, Tony-nominated Kathryn Gallagher of You and the Gossip Girl reboot fame, Broadway veteran Julia Lester of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, and most notably for the college-aged crowd, Bottoms’s Havana Rose Liu and The Sex Lives of College Girls’s Tony-winning Alyah Chanelle Scott.
Margolin found an apt collaborator in Platt—whose own turns in Pitch Perfect and Dear Evan Hansen made the actor a student of the trials of early adulthood—when it came time to bring the play to life. After all, the pair met during their formative high school years and have hoping to collaborate ever since. “Our origin story moment of connection is that someone was doing a Shakespeare monologue [in class], and we found it really funny,” remembers Margolin. A decade-plus later, they finally found their moment to team up, marking Platt’s first foray into theater producing. “It was only a matter of time,” he remarks, when the two met to discuss the project with CULTURED following the show’s run of previews. Here, they recall some highlights from what has already been a wild ride.
Ben Platt: How did the idea for ALL NIGHTER first come about, Nat?
Natalie Margolin: Oh, what an excellent question. Plays, for me, are a space of investigation. ALL NIGHTER is an investigation of what it is to be in a tight group of female friends at a time when your identity is more intertwined with the group than it is your sense of self as an individual. Parts of yourself get distorted in pursuit of togetherness. I went to a very small liberal arts school. I was in a very tight group of friends. Processing that time has felt very rich and fruitful for me.
Platt: What do you think is the biggest difference, change, or surprise from when you first started writing until now?
Margolin: The heart of the play really has remained the same. In some ways, it was a drama in its first iteration. I was writing about something that I experienced as quite sinister—but by putting it in front of an audience, I realized that it's truly a comedy. Working with this amazing group of actors and with Jaki Bradley, our director, to fully realize these characters in full, it's bigger than my dreams. I always imagined this play would be in a very small theater—but putting the stakes of young women on a stage this large has been powerful and amazing. The bigness of this production is the biggest shift. Ben, why did ALL NIGHTER feel like the right project to jump into producing with?
Platt: I have some experience now producing television. I was a producer on The Politician, and in film, I produced Theater Camp. Theater is the thing I waited the longest for because it's the thing I love the deepest, and I value my place in the community the most. I wanted to wait until I had the acumen and understanding, and found a project where I could be helpful in a creative sense. Through my years so far in the business, I've tried to be ultra-judicious about when to work with people I have personal relationships with, only doing that in a scenario where I feel like I can really be of value and it's a project that, even without the relationships, I would still really want to be part of.
This play has been that for me. Though I'm not a woman, I have been in these kinds of tight-knit relationships, many of them involving Natalie, so I understand the dynamic. I'm also passionate about stories that involve reflecting young people in a way that is organic and authentic, and doesn't make them sound more or less intelligent than they are. This project also invites young people into the theater to experience something contemporary that they can see themselves in, but that is still elevated and smart. Those things are few and far between.
Margolin: And it's been so nice working together. What's our favorite response to the show thus far?
Platt: One is the collective response from young women saying that they feel positively and negatively triggered—both—in a very cathartic way. My second favorite is our dear friend Kathryn Gallagher, who we grew up with and shares many of the close relationships we share—of course, she's in the play. Her dad came to the show, and after seeing it for the first time, he was super shaken by it. He was like, “I don't think I ever reckoned with how much young women are grappling with. They're holding so much at once.” The idea that someone who, on paper, is only distantly related to this experience is still getting something from it made me feel really good.
Margolin: I was leaving the theater and going to the wine bar across the street, Ardesia—
Platt: —shout out Ardesia.
Margolin: Excellent wine bar. I was wearing my ALL NIGHTER hat and a group of people were standing in front of me. They turned around and they were like, “Oh my God, did you just see the show? What did you think?” They were very flustered. They were like, “We are here because we have to debrief and we have to discuss it. We're really shaken.” I was like, “I actually wrote it and this is my dream come true, that people see the it and feel moved to discuss, feel moved to debate or unpack.” Being in the room and looking around at our audiences, which have been a lot of young women has been very meaningful. I did a talk back with a playwriting class from Davidson College. It was primarily a group of young female students who are at a small liberal arts college right now, and half of them were teary-eyed. One of them said, “This play made me feel a lot less alone in all the feelings that I feel.” That to me, I was like, Oh, that's why. That's it.
Platt: Natalie’s favorite thing in the world to do is to debrief and to unpack after seeing something. Parsing out dynamics and downloading is what makes up her insides. So, I feel like I get why seeing people do that with your play is so meaningful to you.
Margolin: I felt very satisfied that what I had written had made them ask some questions. How did we balance the levity and fun of getting these women in a room together with the more serious aspects of the show and their lives?
Platt: The large spread of experience levels in this cast is crazy, especially given how amazing all five performances are. We have girls who've never been on stage before, we have girls who are Tony-nominated. Everyone's coming to it with a really different set of tools. We did the first few days of table work in my house. Jaki had an amazing way of creating an even playing field that allowed everybody to feel like they were coming to it from the same lens.
Margolin: Jaki has led this whole process with total clarity and so much warmth. I know she's made me feel that way, and I think all of the actors would agree. The play is ultimately investigating ... the top layer of how these girls communicate and move through the night, which is oftentimes with humor versus what actually is underneath.
Platt: How does the show fit into your body of work thus far? And also moving forward.
Margolin: It really fits. I did The Power of Punctuation, which is also about college roommates. That was my senior thesis, and then it went off-Broadway two years later. I feel like it's ALL NIGHTER's younger sister, because I wrote it while I was in the thick of the very experience this play is about. The theme in my work is that I'm interested in complex female characters. That's why I wanted to write in the first place. There's an amazing list of female characters in the theater, but it's shorter than the list of male characters, so I'm interested in adding to a pile that already is quite substantial, but it could use a few more.
As for moving forward, I have a play about my relationship with my grandma called Bed Bath and the Beyond that I've been working on. I have a very close relationship with my grandma. I lived with her during the pandemic, and I wrote the play to process and investigate that. Again, it's a two-hander, just two women, and I hope it's two roles that people would want to play.
Platt: Yeah, I can confirm that if I were a woman I'd want to play either one of you.
