By Stuart Miller . . . 

Eric Anthamatten seems to have been an amazing guy: a sixth-degree black belt who taught martial arts, a musician, a Ph.D. in philosophy, a professor, a writer about racism and incarceration, and a man who was quick to don a purple wig or shed his clothes. 

In #uglycry, which is a true story, Katie Mack takes us deep into her grief for Anthamatten, her ex-boyfriend with whom she texted daily before he was murdered in Mexico in 2021, at age 43, while trying to save a stranger from harm.

Mack aims to journey deep into her despair, and the scenes in which she goes down the rabbit hole of social media, phone apps and Google searches—in order to try to bring Anthamatten back to life for her—are raw and intense and are a great use of multimedia. 

Audience members and Katie Mack (far right)

But Mack, a creature of social media, is fascinated by the idea of using audience phones in theater spaces, and while this sometimes fuses with her grief to enhance the play, it’s not as immersive as advertised and is frequently a distraction. 

Upon entering the theater you’re asked for one song you’d like played at your funeral and then you’re ushered up on the stage to meet Mack, who talks to small groups about their relationship with social media and to name one person who they have lost and grieved. But the songs are only played quietly during those pre-show discussions, and Mack underutilizes the potential for bonding with the audience: she starts the show by posing for a group photo with us, which she posts to social media; but thereafter her interactions with us are all utterly superficial. 

Had she asked one or two people to simply discuss the person they had lost, it would have united us to each other and to her. (Similarly, her pre-show instructions say “Learn the name of the person next to you,” but there’s never an opportunity for that.)

Katie Mack

If you back into a hot radiator you’ll move away quickly. But good acting backs you into an emotional radiator and manages to keep you there. The problem with Mack’s show is that she’s the one who moves away. She spends most of the evening on a treadmill (she’s training for an IronMan event, something she told Anthamatten she’d do) and is so busy running nowhere that she often forgoes a chance to let us sit with her grief for a beat or more. I understand that this mirrors how she struggled with her own feelings, but it hurts the play. 

The show is frequently filled with frantic antics, like when she brings two audience members onstage to compete in a game in which they capture her image and post it on social media. There are too many moments like this that are loud and frenetic, and this one in particular pulls attention away from the narrative and the emotion. 

Worst of all, instead of telling us about Anthametten’s life and his murder herself, she defers to a prerecorded social media video of a drag queen applying makeup and somewhat campily telling us the story of the tragedy. Then, when she begins reading Anthamatten’s credentials aloud, the video speeds up, once again undermining any emotion. It should have been incredibly sad, but instead, it’s a gimmick.

Katie Mack

There are several memorable scenes in which Mack forgoes the loud performative gestures and the use of technology and lets us get to know Anthamatten as well as the man she began dating after Anthamatten died; he seems to be a mixture of a saint and a teddy bear. 

We do get glimpses of Anthamatten’s sweetness, his romantic and silly sides like the time he comes to see her perform in a terrible production of The Comedy of Errors in “deep Brooklyn,” in which she’s co-starring with puppets. He brings her a bouquet . . . of peppers. On the train back, Mack, not realizing what kind of peppers they are, makes a show of sinking her teeth into a Carolina Reaper. As she starts coughing and crying, Anthamatten smiles and takes a bite himself, joining Mack in her spicy torment. 

Had Mack truly bonded with the audience over her grief and ours, and had she spent more time letting us get to know the people in her life—trusting us to handle all the emotion—we might have all had a good “ugly cry” before the night was over. Still, while the use of all our modern technology was not as consistently effective as she’d hoped, Mack did accomplish her goal—I left the theater wanting to know more about Anthamatten . . . and, of course, found everything I could by going online.

#uglycry. Through November 18 at the Chain Theatre (312 West 36th Street, 4th Floor, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues). 90 minutes, no intermission. www.insideoffthewall.com 

Photos: Heather Mull Photography