New Born, by Ella Hickson, recently concluded its limited engagement at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre with a play that reverberates through the mind long after the curtain falls.

Consisting of three seemingly unrelated one-act plays performed as extended monologues, New Born deftly explores the eternal cycle of birth, death, rebirth, and transformation. This story is an ouroboros, and if you killed the ouroboros you would see inside the dead snake eight baby snakes, and like a heavy rock dropped into still water, each story sends ripples outward, overlapping and expanding until they become part of a larger meditation on existence itself.

Playwright Ella Hickson created something remarkably intimate, original, and affecting.

The first monologue introduces Light, played with extraordinary nuance and emotional range by Sepideh Moafi. Light is a forty-year-old graphic designer, wife, and mother whose life has settled into a comfortable routine. She loves her husband. She loves her young child. Yet beneath the stability lurks dissatisfaction, a sense that life is moving forward while she remains asleep.

She’s stuck. A mid-life crisis of sorts. Then while out one evening, Light catches the attention of a younger British pop star, think Charle XCX, but with green eyes. What begins as a chance encounter evolves into an intimate friendship fueled by texts, emotional vulnerability, and attraction. The premise strains credibility at times, like why exactly does this A-list star like our middle-aged drab mom, but Moafi sells every moment. What matters is not whether the relationship feels realistic. What matters is what awakens inside Light.

She feels alive again, new-born.

The story becomes less about infidelity and more about possibility, temptation, and the choices we make when confronted with alternate versions of ourselves. Ultimately, Light chooses responsibility over desire, family over fantasy. And as the years pass, the play circles back to themes of birth and death, culminating in a near tragedy involving her teenage son that forces both mother and child into a new stage of life.

Moafi’s performance is extraordinary.

By the end, the audience feels as if it has lived decades alongside her.

The second monologue, and perhaps the strongest of the three, transports audiences to late nineteenth-century Wyoming.

Mariana Gailus delivers a captivating performance as Rattle, a young bartender navigating life in the American frontier. What begins with an awkward incident involving a bloody rag quickly evolves into a layered story about womanhood, violence, race, loss, and survival.

Rattle develops feelings for a handsome local cowboy named John while grappling with the presence of Wyatt, a volatile figure whose cruelty seems impossible to understand. Along the way she befriends a young Black boy named James, whose disappearance becomes one of the play’s central mysteries.

Hickson slowly reveals the hidden wounds driving her characters. Wyatt’s brutality, initially shocking and unforgivable, gains tragic context when we learn what we learn. It’s an ouroboros and the story becomes another meditation on grief and the ways loss can distort a person.

Gailus completely inhabits the role. By the time the monologue ends, audiences feel transported to another century. And the final reveal lands with tremendous emotional force.

New Born Play Review

The third and final monologue introduces Deadwood, played by Hugh Jackman.

A tree surgeon by trade, Deadwood spends his days cutting down dying trees and transforming them into something new. The metaphor is hardly subtle, but it works beautifully.

Deadwood falls in love, becomes a father, loses that relationship, finds another, and eventually suffers a devastating accident that leaves him permanently disabled. As his life narrows physically, he is forced to become someone new and is a victim of his own karma.

The story explores aging, attraction, regret, forgiveness, and resilience. It asks difficult questions about commitment and desire. What happens when love changes? What survives after passion fades? How many versions of ourselves do we become over the course of a lifetime?

How many can we live with?

Jackman brings warmth, vulnerability, and quiet humor to the role, grounding the play’s philosophical ambitions in genuine humanity.

What makes New Born so compelling is the consistency of its vision.

The three monologues differ wildly in setting, tone, and circumstance, but they are united by a profound fascination with cycles. Birth leads to death which leads to rebirth.

This is some of the strongest writing seen on or off Broadway this season.

New Born is thoughtful without becoming pretentious, philosophical without becoming abstract, and resonant without ever being manipulative. It lingers, provokes and demands reflection.

The production may have closed, but the questions it asks remain.

What are we after we are born again?

And what comes next?