By: Jim Manley
By the time the lights come up at Theatre71, the house onstage in Broken Snow has already been waiting. It sits in silence, snowbound and sealed off from the world, holding its breath along with the men inside it. For the playwright Ben Andron, that image arrived before anything else. It was not a line of dialogue or a fully formed character that unlocked the play, but something smaller and stranger.
“An old cigar box,” Andron said recently. “That’s the kind of thing where you’d hide a deep dark secret from the past you don’t want anyone to find.”
That sense of concealment, of objects carrying histories that refuse to stay buried, runs through Broken Snow, a psychological drama directed by Colin Hanlon and starring Tom Cavanagh, Tony Danza and Michael Longfellow. The play begins with a meeting between two men in an abandoned house, but quickly expands into something more unsettling. As they dig into their shared past, what emerges is less a mystery to be solved than a reckoning that cannot be avoided.
Andron traces the origin of the story to a real event he encountered years ago, one that lingered long after he first heard it. He has been reluctant to describe it in detail, wary of spoiling the experience for audiences, but he recalls being struck by its horror and its emotional implications. The challenge was not simply what happened, but how to tell it.
“The horror of it fascinated me,” he said. “But I didn’t know how to tell that story.”
What ultimately gave shape to the play was a broader question about inheritance. Not the kind that is written into wills, but the kind that is passed down in silence. Broken Snow is preoccupied with the idea that identity can be shaped as much by what is hidden as by what is known.
“I think we’re in an interesting time where information is so available,” Andron said. “But it wasn’t that long ago that it wasn’t, and secrets that our grandparents and great grandparents were keeping could be lost forever.”
For Andron, the question is not simply what happens when those secrets come to light, but what they do to the people who uncover them. He speaks about the destabilizing effect of learning that a family story is incomplete or untrue, and the way that discovery can ripple through a person’s sense of self.
“What does that mean about you, and who you are?” he said.
The playwright’s own history shadows the work. He grew up hearing that his grandparents, Holocaust survivors, were the only remaining members of their families. Years later, he discovered that there were relatives in Germany and Lithuania whom no one had known about. The revelation came after he had already written a play about buried family truths, giving the project an unexpected resonance.
“Taking that idea one step further and having that discovery call your own identity into question is really what this play is about,” he said.
Photo Courtesy: Shirin Tinat (Broken Snow Playwright Ben Andron)
If the emotional terrain of Broken Snow is expansive, its physical world is deliberately constricted. The action unfolds in a house that offers no escape, a setting that Andron describes as essential to the story’s pressure.
“We can avoid just about anything,” he said. “But then there are moments where you can’t escape, where you’re forced to be fully present.”
That sense of inescapability shapes the rhythms of the play, which moves between confrontation and uneasy stillness. It is also something that came into sharper focus during rehearsals. Andron credits Hanlon with helping him refine the pacing, identifying moments where the tension faltered and needed recalibration.
“Colin has such a strong eye for rhythm and pace,” Andron said. “We had conversations about places where it feels like we’re hitting speed bumps that I didn’t fully appreciate until we were in the room.”
The cast brings together performers from different corners of the industry, a mix that Andron sees reflected in the characters themselves. Longfellow, best known for his work on Saturday Night Live, takes on a role that is darker and more volatile than audiences might expect. For Andron, that unpredictability was precisely the point.
“Michael’s brilliance is that he finds the unexpected,” he said. “He knows how to zig when the audience expects him to zag.”
It is a company that blends television, comedy, and Broadway pedigree. Tom Cavanagh brings a layered intensity shaped by years of screen work, Tony Danza carries the ease and authority of a seasoned stage and television performer, and Longfellow injects a sharp, contemporary unpredictability. Together, they form a trio that spans generations, echoing the play’s themes of legacy and inheritance while keeping the tension immediate and alive in the room.
Offstage, the production carries its own unlikely backstory. Andron, producer Daveed Ben-Arie and general manager Aaron Grant all attended the same Jewish day school in Florida, though at different times. Their connection stretches back to a theater program run by Andron’s father, creating a through line that mirrors the play’s own preoccupation with generational ties.
“It was the theater program that brought us together,” Andron said, recalling how the relationships evolved over time into a professional collaboration.
That sense of continuity, of past and present folding into each other, is at the heart of Broken Snow. The play may be structured as a mystery, but Andron is less interested in the mechanics of revelation than in its consequences.
“The mystery of what happened is really powerful,” he said. “But the play isn’t just about that.”
What he hopes lingers with audiences is something more personal. Each of the three characters undergoes a different emotional journey, grappling with identity, shame, resentment, and, ultimately, the possibility of forgiveness.
“My hope is that everyone is able to connect to one of those themes and find a bit of themselves in it,” he said.
Broken Snow is now playing at Theatre71 (152 West 71st Street, NYC), with performances running through May 24. Tickets are currently available through the production’s official website BrokenSnow.com.
