Theater Online - New York Theater Reviews

Kirstin Olson ©2025  The growing love of Matthew and Tammy (Adam Smith, Kristina Olson) is regarded with both admiration and jealousy by their friend Ted (Damian Maffei) in Miracle Day, a play by Tom Sime.

In his self-described “romantic comedy-drama,” Miracle Day, playwright Tom Sime asks us to consider the consequences of the exceedingly popular impulse to pop a pharmacological fix to answer our existential dilemmas. Unfortunately, it seems that even the most miraculous of substances cannot save us from depression, loneliness or bad art.

Matthew, a mid-career painter played by a spirited Adam Smith, meets a young admirer, played by Kristina Olson, in a bar after he has had five too many.  After she lavishes him with compliments, his intoxicated ego leads him to trouble by calling a waiter a “faggot.”  The waiter, played by an imposing Damian Maffei, is coming to terms with his own homosexuality and the slur sends him into a violent rage that puts Matthew into a coma.

When Matthew awakens, his female fan, Tammy, is there to nurse him back to health, clean his apartment, and have sex with him immediately but not before the dazed artist has a chance to swallow a newly prescribed painkiller. Matthew instantly becomes a devotee of the pill while he simultaneously declares his undying love for Tammy, leaving us to wonder whether his ecstasy is just a side effect of the delicious drug.

Kirstin Olson ©2025  Matthew (Adam Smith, left) recoils in fear from his suddenly violent friend Ted (Damian Maffei, right) in Miracle Day, a play by Tom Sime.

Humorous conflations like this sustain interest for the first act as melodic, dreamy guitar rifts by Yanina Davydova and bass lines Vern Woodland intersect scenes as if to promise a future, surreal breakthrough at a culminating peak that the play ultimately fails to deliver. Despite the comic zeal of Smith, whose charisma keeps the play afloat, an overwrought plot only introduces more and more problems for characters who end up trapped in a pat affirmation of the status quo. When a second act party scene arrives, there are so many issues at play it becomes difficult to pursue any to satisfying end, leading to a resolution that feels as familiar as a warning label.

Smith’s energetic performance holds up as the play departs from comedy and heads into drama by effectively conveying Matthew’s sense of loss.  Maffei also succeeds in creating a character of contradictions, although it is unclear how to reconcile his character’s coming out story with acautionary tale on the perils of drug abuse. The play presents these two storylines as if they are logically related, making for some troubling conclusions that Sime does not seem in control of.  Marcella Goheen finds the dark side of funny as a misanthropic art dealer who dryly admits to trusting art more than people.

Sime is at his best when his characters convey the unhappy realities of modern life with unexpected humor that belie an unflattering depiction of human relationships. Sadly, he does not follow through on this darker purpose and resorts to the usual moralizing conclusions about the dangers of extremity.