Review: An Online Chat Turns Unnerving in ‘The Thing With Feathers’

NEW YORK — Anna’s laptop is open on the bed in her messy room, but she doesn’t pay the screen much attention. She’s doing homework, writing by hand in a notebook as she casually banters with someone online — chatter about Emily Dickinson that veers into more personal territory.

Friendly and a little mocking, Anna — the central character in Scott Organ’s spine-tingling new play “The Thing With Feathers” — is less eager for this conversation than the older guy she’s talking with. His name is Eric, or so he’s told her, and they’ve never met in person. When he floats the idea of a real-world encounter, she quashes it with the seriousness of a smart kid eyeing ambitions larger than her little corner of the world. She is 16, and she can’t afford to be distracted.

“I’m just keeping my head down, you know?” she says, throwing in a Dickinson reference to make her point. “I need to get the heck out of my own personal ‘280 Main Street, Amherst, Mass.'”

Alexa Shae Niziak, who plays Anna, is also 16, and her command of the role is extraordinary — because she is so young, yes, but mainly because she is so entirely at home in her character’s skin. A veteran of Broadway shows including “Matilda the Musical,” Niziak is the heart of the excellent ensemble that powers this world premiere, directed by Seth Barrish for The Barrow Group.

Part thriller, part coming-of-age story, “The Thing With Feathers” is about chickens coming home to roost. The play fatally falls apart at the end, but Organ keeps us entertained for a good long while before that, making us guess and guess again about what, exactly, is going on here.

At the start, Anna and her mother, Beth (DeAnna Lenhart), are thriving. On their own since Anna was little, they are unusually close. They seem to skirt the prickly confrontations that come with adolescence — though Anna is, in the way of so many teenagers, a master of casually if affectionately withering condescension.

Beth, a real estate agent, has finally found a truly good man, a cop named Tim (Robert Manning Jr.) who is calm, dependable, strong — and, she’s certain, about to propose. Eric (Zachary Booth) has romantic intentions, too, but he is a far more damaged creature. When he shows up uninvited at their house, forcing a face-to-face meeting with Anna, what he wants and what kind of danger he poses are unclear. He has precisely calculated the detonating impact he intends to have.

About that title, though. “The Thing With Feathers” is also a Dickinson reference, and Organ is mistaken in clinging to it. The later sections of the play feel contrived in a way that nothing that comes before does; he is determined to let a concept — the allusion to hope in that poem’s title — rule the action. But the characters, sprung to life, have long since taken over.

The Thing with FeathersThrough February 10 at the Barrow Group Theater, Manhattan; 866-811-4111, barrowgroup.org. Run time: 2 hours 15 minutes.