10-03-2025
Backstage at All Nighter , the Off-Broadway Play That's a Crash Course in the Female College Experience
Photos taken by All Nighter cast for Teen Vogue
When the cast of All Nighter gathers in the lobby of Midtown Manhattan's Newman Mills Theater, the home of their limited engagement off-Broadway play, their energy is bright-eyed and eager. In just a few hours, Kathryn Gallagher, Julia Lester, Alyah Chanelle Scott, Havana Rose Liu, and Kristine Frøseth will perform one of their last previews before their big opening night on Sunday, March 9.
There's a sense of fresh excitement flowing through the group. Scott, who is a three-time Tony-winning producer and star of Max's Sex Lives of College Girls, was originally introduced to the play on the production side but ended up coming on board as an actor; Gallagher and Lester, two more Tony-nominated performers (for their work in the musicals Jagged Little Pill and Into the Woods, respectively), are making their stage play debuts with All Nighter, while the production marks Liu and Frøseth's professional theater debuts on the whole.
'[This] was only the second reading I had ever done of a play in my life other than fourth grade drama,' Liu laughs, thinking back to the 2023 reading she did of All Nighter alongside Scott, Lester, and Gallagher. 'I had been curious about dipping a single toe into theater, and then I did this and thought it was the scariest thing I'd ever done. I then wanted to do another one because it's adrenaline-boosting.'
Highly-concentrated adrenaline is very much the ethos of All Nighter. Written by Natalie Margolin and directed by Jaki Bradley, the 95-minute play — with no intermissions — follows five young women, all graduating seniors at a liberal arts college in rural Pennsylvania.
The thicker-than-thieves friend group have reached the tail end of their college careers, and after one last night spent toiling over their finals together, begin to realize that forced proximity might just be what is truly keeping them close.
The play is set in 2014, something former High School Musical: The Musical: The Series star Lester points out jokingly: while the show is a contemporary piece of art, it technically now qualifies as a period piece.
With nods to that year's huge cultural moments, like the world's obsession with hummus and the omnipresence of 'Wrecking Ball' from Miley Cyrus's Bangerz era, the show depicts the unraveling of these young women under the pressure of their final all-nighter. Productivity, sobriety, and friendship are all tested in a way that feels strikingly familiar.
'The way [Natalie] writes young women is with such a level of complexity,' Gallagher, who is close friends with the playwright and has witnessed the show in all its stages of formulation, says. 'It lacks a fear of messiness that I think is true to a young woman's experience.' That relatability is necessary when putting on a play — a single set stage, with most of the cast never leaving it, can be intimidating even for the most seasoned of actors.
'We don't have an ensemble of dancers behind us doing flips,' Gallagher says. 'I used to have this joke with a buddy of mine. I was doing Spring Awakening at the time. He was doing Hamilton. I was like, 'Okay, what's the number in your show that even if everybody's having an off night, you can draw the audience back in?' He was like, 'My Shot.' You have that in a musical. Plays, you can't go away. You've got to be there. It's terrifying. It is so vulnerable.'
With no catchy songs to keep the audience's energy in line, it comes down to the script and the players on stage, helping each other along the way. In All Nighter, those characters are Tessa, played by Scott, the 'rich b*tch' of the group; Lizzy, played by Liu, the very anxious theatre kid; Darcie, played by Frøseth, the seemingly well-adjusted and 'productive' lover-girl; Jacqueline, played by Gallagher, the queer and co-dependent friend forcefully holding them all together; and Wilma, played by Lester, the 'queen of Johnson' and an absolute stick of dynamite.
Liu, who the whole cast says has an affinity for analogies, compares doing this show to being on a big league football team. Everyone is working together to score a touchdown, something they've collectively never done before — so when they reach their goal, they cheer as loudly as possible.
That teamwork is why this group of young actresses feel so welcoming on and off stage. They finish each other's sentences, encourage one another to share their perspectives, and laugh constantly during our interview, in the same natural way their characters do on stage.
Their closeness is a byproduct of the necessary constant reassurance of one other as live actors; while there are a lot of 'warm-ups and coffee' to get you zoned in to repeatedly put on a no-stops play, Lester admits that, ultimately, you have to 'lock the f*ck in.'
'I think we're all prepared to [lock in] because there's a vulnerability within yourself every time you step out on stage,' she says. 'You are in charge of what you're doing. But really, and especially in this show, but in theater in general, it's about taking care of the people around you. And if you're not present for others, you're not going to be present for yourself. We look each other in the eyes before every show, we tap in, we say, 'I got your back.' We have a little moment where we just look at each other and we're like, 'See you out there.''
All Nighter taps into every possible corner of what it means to be a young woman in her early twenties, exploring narratives of sexual assault, friendship betrayal, fear of the unknown, and sexual identity.
Scott and Gallagher's characters are both figuring out what it means to be queer in 2014, and Rose's character is navigating the nuanced emotions attached to sexual assault and how it can shape a survivor. For the Bottoms actress, playing Lizzy is an honor she doesn't take lightly.
'It feels like a very soft exchange of the truth with my performance and the audience in a way that I've never experienced before around any kind of acting I've ever done,' Liu says. 'When I enter into those sections of the play, I feel like I am really sitting with everyone in the audience around that experience and my own, and it feels like a little part of me, every night, is a little bit healed by that.'
While the play touches on very intimate, sticky, and intense topics, it's also filled with laughter. One moment, the show will have you crying alongside Lizzy as she unpacks her trauma and belly-laughing at Wilma's unabashed personality the next. That visceral pain and comedic relief are beautifully tethered together, and is exactly how Scott would describe 'what it's like to be a woman,' especially one on the brink of that world-rocking post-college transition.
'I would love to be as sure of anything as I was at 22,' Gallagher says. 'It's fun getting to revisit that time of life where… you're not worrying about the consequences because you don't know that life has that many yet. You don't know that there are friends that won't be there anymore. You haven't really left the nest. You haven't entered the real world. It's a powerful time to be a young woman because you haven't known the extent to which people will treat you like you don't know what the f*ck you're talking about.'
Gallagher, Lester, Scott, and Liu all say that they immediately wanted to join the project after reading the script. With Broadway's current surge of young stars and young attendees, the cast of All Nighter hopes their show reminds Gen Z that the third spaces they're so desperately looking for rely on real-world connections.
Recently, at the stage door, Lester met a few fans who said All Nighter was their first play. Some even made friends with other strangers attending the previews and came back to see it once more as a newly formed group. That commitment to the arts, and each other, is something these women can only hope will continue to bloom among audiences.
'I hope that we can in some way remind this generation that being connected comes from being in person with people," Liu says. 'I worry about our generation. I worry about the generations below me as well. I have younger brothers and I think they're so smart, they're so [digitally] savvy… But I also hope that they can find that magic of true connection because I think that loneliness is an epidemic in our culture… that's partially due to digital media as well."
'I do hope that [our play] allows young people to find a little bit more synergy with each other,' Liu continues as Scott begins to tear up, "And invest more into those group dynamics of going to the theater, going to a cinema, more [of that] in-person activity COVID robbed us of.'
'The reason people go to see Chappell Roan and buy Taylor Swift tickets is because they crave community and they crave experiences that they can share," Scott adds. "It's a gift to be able to be in the Newman Mills Theater for 95 minutes every night and offer that and welcome them into this space and to say, 'Hi, we want to host you, we care about your opinions, and we value you.' Me as a person, me as a producer, me as everything, that is what I want to do in the world.'
All Nighter is a crash course into the complex college-educated female mind, filled with laughter, tears, and a heavy load of responsibility — for themselves and for each other. Over the next ten weeks, these actresses will create a unique bond with one another and their audiences… and will desperately struggle to avoid eating all of their all-nighter snack props or touching the 'apology wine,' a small but mighty instrument in the dissolution of Tessa, Jacqueline, Darcie, Lizzy, and Wilma's friendship.
'That last show I'm going to eat those donuts," Gallagher says. 'The last day, we are drinking the apology wine.' And they all nod in agreement, in sisterhood.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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