Forever in There or F*ck Around and Find Out. The title may be easily forgotten, but not the gripping Theatre of NOTE World Premiere that Kill Shelter’s Ashley Rose Wellman has written about two Americans at long last freed from captivity in an unspecified foreign danger zone.

It’s been two years now since Bailey (Scout Gutzmerson) and Jake (Armando Torres) were taken hostage in a country categorized by the U.S. State Department as “highest risk” for American travelers, i.e. go there at your own peril because the United States government can provide little or no assistance during an emergency.

Did the ex-couple go there as “journalists” to document life in a far-off corner of the world? Were they hoping to rekindle past romantic flames? Or was it a combination of both?

Regardless of their reasons for putting their lives at risk, Bailey and Jake quickly found themselves at the mercy of radicals hoping to make big ransom bucks, and for two harrowing years, they were held captive in separate minuscule cells.

And they would still be being held hostage (or worse) had Bailey’s mother Mara (Kathleen O’Grady), her younger sibling Jax (Amberlee Clark), Jake’s older brother Pete (Henry Cruz), and Jake’s current girlfriend Victoria (Elizabeth Trieu) not managed to come up with the cash to extricate them from harm’s way.

How will Bailey and Jake react to their newfound freedom? How will they deal with the changes that have taken place over the past two years?  Will they find ways to reintegrate into a world at once refreshingly familiar and frighteningly strange?

These are the questions at the heart of Wellman’s follow-up to her award-winning Kill Shelter, and though I would have gone with a more marketable title like Aftermath, you don’t need to remember what her latest, out-of-today’s-headlines play is called to find yourself glued to the edge of your seat as you discover how Bailey and Jack’s families’ lives have changed since their abduction, how they managed to meet an exorbitant ransom demand, and most importantly, what the future holds for the sixsome now that danger has passed.

Still, as compellingly as Forever in There or F*ck Around and Find Out reads on paper, it’s even more riveting as directed by Chicago-to-L.A. transplant Spenser Davis.

Davis’s distinctive stamp begins with his largely successful decision to stage Wellman’s play, not in the precise locations she’s described in her script, among them a hotel room in a foreign city, various New Jersey apartments, and a podcast studio, but arena style on Mark Mendelson’s mostly bare raised boxing-ring-like stage, an inspired design that situates us in a limbo much like the one the Bailey, Jake, and the rest have lived in for years (albeit one that loses impact when all six find themselves seated around it during an extended at-the-dinner-table scene during which nobody hardly moves an inch).

That quibble aside, Gutzmerson and Torres deliver a pair of intensely powerful performances as exes who should have known better than to travel blithely into a Level 4 danger zone, but didn’t deserve the two years of mental torture they were forced to endure, and not only do O’Grady, Clark, and Cruz provide powerhouse support, it’s rare that actors portraying family members look as if they shared the same genes as these do, with Trieu doing her own affecting work as “the other woman.”

Matt Richter’s lighting and Stephanie Yackovetsky’s sound design double the play’s dramatic impact and its characters’ disorientation every step of the way with additional design kudos going to Shona Young’s just-right costume choices.

Raul Vega Martinez, Chloe Madriaga, Gabriel Montoya, Julia Prud-homme, Sigi Ravet, and Lillie Silva-Muir comprise the production’s understudy cast.

Forever in There or F*ck Around and Find Out is produced by Bill Voorhees. Tamika Katon-Donegal, J.T. Melargano, and Yackovetsky are associate producers. Maya Gonzalez is stage manager. Ken Werther is publicist.

Unwieldy title aside, Forever in There or F*ck Around and Find Out further cements Ashley Rose Wellman’s status as one of L.A. theater’s rising playwriting stars. Its look at the Aftermath of a single disastrous decision will grab you and hold you captive from its startling opening scene to its deeply moving finish.

Theatre of NOTE, 1517 N. Cahuenga, Hollywood. Through September 7. Mondays, Fridays, and Saturdays at 8:00. Sundays at 7:00
www.theatreofnote.com

–Steven Stanley
October 8, 2026
Photos: Andrew Ge

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Tags: Ashley Rose Wellman, Los Angeles Theater Review, Theatre Of NOTE