Sea Wall / A Life Tickets

By: Sea Wall by Simon Stephens and A Life by Nick Payne
Director: Carrie Cracknell
Producer: Nine Stories, Ambassador Theatre Group, Seaview Productions, Benjamin Lowy Productions, and The Public Theater
Cast list: Tom Sturridge (in Sea Wall) and Jake Gyllenhaal (in A Life)
Design: Laura Jellinek
Lighting: Guy Hoare
Costume: Kaye Voyce
Other info: Original Music by Stuart Earl

Simon Stephens’s “Sea Wall” and Nick Payne’s “A Life” are dynamic reflections on love, life and loss, and the one-man plays thematically complement each other and seem “designed to be bookends,” according to The New York Times. Both plays center on men who are navigating love and loss as sons, fathers, and husbands. “Sea Wall” stars Tom Sturridge and is about a photographer experiencing a crisis while on vacation in France with his family. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a music producer, loving husband, and new father in “A Life,” a meditation on the meaning of life and death and the space in between. Each play pulls at the heartstrings — but as a double bill, the show produces an affecting emotional blow.

“Sea Wall” first bowed in London at the Old Vic in 2018. The play was paired as a double bill with “A Life” and was presented at New York City’s The Public Theater for a sold-out run in 2019. “Sea Wall/A Life,” starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge, earned several award nominations — Gyllenhaal’s performance received nominations from the Drama League and Outer Critics Circle, and Sturridge received a Lucille Lortel Award nomination. The show will transfer to Broadway’s Hudson Theatre for a limited run. Carrie Cracknell, who directed the show at The Public Theater, directs the show on Broadway. The New York Times made the show a “Critic’s Pick” and said, “The performances give you plenty to ponder in showing how we now read life, with or without fate, as everyone’s tragedy.”

What to watch for

Academy Award nominee Jake Gyllenhaal last appeared on Broadway, at the Hudson Theatre, in “Sunday in the Park with George” in 2017.

Tom Sturridge was nominated for a Tony Award for the 2013 Broadway production of “Orphans.”

Both actors have collaborated with these two playwrights multiple times. Gyllenhaal starred in Payne’s “Constellations” on Broadway, while Sturridge began his theatrical career with Stephens’s “Punk Rock” in London.

Simon Stephens’s other works include “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time” and “Heisenberg,” among others. Nick Payne’s other plays include “Constellations” and “Elegy.”

Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge both star in the Netflix film “Velvet Buzzsaw.”