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Lee

 
Olivia Thompson Review by Olivia Thompson 3 Published: 1 Oct 2025 Park Theatre Show Dates: 24 Sep 2025-18 Oct 2025

In 1969 on Long Island, artist Lee Krasner is painting in her studio when she is interrupted by Hank, a young delivery boy and aspiring artist. He brings her his portfolio, along with an incomplete canvas he claims was given to his father by Krasner’s late husband, Jackson Pollock. This is the central conflict driving Lee, now playing at the Park Theatre.

A layered conversation about creativity, drive, and personal grief.

The production initially struggles to build momentum, with little real tension until well into the play. Yet once the dispute over the painting emerges, the relationship between Lee and Hank takes strong form, as the two near-strangers with a shared passion begin to unpack the consequences of pursuing an artistic career. What follows is less a tightly driven drama than a layered conversation about creativity, ambition and grief.

Helen Goldwyn leads the play with a nuanced performance as Krasner: fierce and inspired, yet fatigued from working in an overtly patriarchal industry. In one affecting moment, she asks Hank to name a female artist. After a long pause, he can only suggest her own name. Thirteen years after Pollock’s death, she is still haunted by his legacy. Tom Andrews’s Pollock appears in flashbacks and as a figure in her imagination – brash and often unkind. His depiction is grating to a modern audience, and at times feels superfluous to the direction of the plot. Structurally, Pollock’s onstage presence embodies his thematic place in Krasner’s world: an addition that is unnecessary but domineering, and frustratingly inevitable.

Will Bagnall’s Hank provides a foil: earnest, eager and at times implausibly naïve about the art world. His dialogue with Krasner often feels more like an interview, but it allows the play to probe questions of authenticity, gender, and what it means to create art out of grief. Krasner grieves for Pollock and her mother; Hank for his father. Through their struggles emerges the unanswered question of how personal pain translates into artistic intent.

By reimagining these encounters, Lee highlights both the struggles of female artists in a patriarchal system and the complicated dream of chasing artistic accomplishment in a traditionally flawed creative industry.

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The Blurb:

1969. Local delivery boy and art student Hank seeks advice on his portfolio from artist Lee Krasner, widow of Jackson Pollock. When Hank produces one final painting in the form of a rolled-up canvas, Lee accuses him of stealing the work from her home. As the stakes rise and Hank becomes increasing increasingly determined to uncover the truth, Lee is forced to question everything she knew about her late husband's genius.