The convenience store in Supermarket 86 is an anonymous, undistinguished place, where four young women blow in with the blizzard that’s settling over Ithaca in upstate New York, and end up staying the night, along with the store’s cashier. It isn’t quite a “meet as strangers, leave as friends” scenario, as, over the course of drinking and playing “Truth or Dare,” the women discover various past connections among themselves and address unresolved conflicts.
This is a character-driven show, and it succeeds in the difficult task of delineating five individuals within a short running time, thanks primarily to strong acting. Mia Pelosi, who also wrote the script, is a particular standout as the cashier Rose: her expressively husky voice often itself suggests, with subtlety and precision, the frustrations of a “townie” stuck in a dead-end job in a place that revolves around its Ivy League university.
Even for being set in a convenience store, however, there is a lot that happens here that is just a little too convenient. If you are able to suspend your disbelief over the initial premise, there is still coincidence after coincidence in the women’s past associations to get through – a credibility stretch that does not sit easily within an otherwise highly naturalistic script. There is also the contrivance of characters who disappear and reappear for dubious reasons but always exactly in time to allow other pairs to hold intimate conversations.
The dialogue is often stagey, and can be awkward in its exposition. The artificial tidiness in the presentation and resolution of conflicts, in general, can make them feel more like drama school exercises than real life, in all its nuanced messiness.
Indeed, the real world barely intrudes upon Supermarket 86, which does heighten the intensity of the young women’s exchanges, but also deprives the story of the scope to be about anything that happens beyond its walls. While the drama captures a moment in time and provides a snapshot of five lives briefly intersecting, it does not leave us with reasons to care about how the encounter affects them, or cause us to reflect on their relationships or the wider contexts of their lives.
