When Crosswords Become Confessional: The Theatrical Alchemy of Hub City’s Latest Show
There’s something delightfully absurd about a one-woman play centered on crossword puzzles. After all, crosswords are solitary, silent rituals—scratching letters in the margins of a newspaper, muttering at a screen at 3 a.m. But Hub City Theatre Company’s The Crossword Play doesn’t just dramatize puzzle-making; it weaponizes it as a metaphor for life’s chaotic, unsolvable mess. And honestly? It’s about time someone treated crosswords like the existential crisis they truly are.
The Puzzling Brilliance of Turning Grids into Griots
Let’s get this straight: crosswords aren’t just about knowing that “17-Across is a four-letter word for existential dread.” They’re about the human compulsion to impose order on chaos. What makes The Crossword Play so fascinating is how it weaponizes this tension. The protagonist—a crossword constructor whose life unravels as her grids tighten—mirrors our own desperation to “solve” our problems. Personally, I’ve always found crosswords to be a low-stakes rehearsal for life’s bigger failures. You think you’ve got it all figured out, then realize 1-Across is a noun and you’ve written a verb. Life’s a grid, and we’re all stuck in the black squares.
Kelly Maust, the show’s performer, argues that live theater doesn’t need to be a pilgrimage to Nashville or Memphis. But what she’s really saying is that art thrives in the friction between expectation and reality. This isn’t just about accessibility—it’s about challenging the assumption that “small” means “simple.” A 15x15 crossword can hold more nuance than a 100-page manifesto. Why shouldn’t a 75-minute play in a coffee shop?
Why We’re All Secretly Solving the Wrong Clues
One thing that immediately stands out is how the play weaponizes the audience’s own biases. We enter expecting a quirky comedy about crosswords, only to realize we’re being asked to confront our own obsession with control. The protagonist’s descent into chaos isn’t just a plot device—it’s a mirror. How many of us cling to planners and spreadsheets, mistaking organization for meaning? Crosswords are just hieroglyphics we pretend to decode. The real puzzle is figuring out why we need the illusion of answers.
And let’s talk about the coffee. A free cup with a ticket isn’t just a gimmick; it’s a Trojan horse. Coffee fuels the late-night puzzle sessions, the frantic scribbling, the moments of clarity and despair. It’s the liquid embodiment of the show’s ethos: creativity thrives on the mundane. You don’t need velvet seats and champagne. You need caffeine and the courage to erase half your life’s work at 2 a.m.
The Bigger Picture: Why This Matters Beyond Jackson
What this really suggests is that fringe theater is becoming the last refuge for stories that refuse to be boxed. In an age of streaming and algorithmic content, The Crossword Play dares to be unsearchable, unscalable, and unapologetically local. It’s a rebellion against the homogenization of culture. If you take a step back, the play’s structure—fragmented, nonlinear, stubbornly analog—feels like a rejection of the “bingeable” narrative industrial complex. It’s theater as a crossword: you can’t rush it, and the satisfaction comes from the struggle.
Final Thoughts: The Black Squares We All Inhabit
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: life doesn’t have a ‘Check Answers’ button. The Crossword Play forces us to sit with that discomfort, to find humor and humanity in the blanks. From my perspective, the real magic isn’t in the performance itself—it’s in the conversations afterward. The way strangers bond over spilled coffee and shared confusion. The way someone might leave humming a tune from the show… while silently drafting a clue for “existential ennui” in their head. That’s the power of art that dares to be both trivial and profound. After all, isn’t that what crosswords—and life—are all about?
