‘The Visit’ review: Money reshapes morality in the modern classic

Writing in the wake of World War II, Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt returned again and again to the subject of guilt. He was haunted by Switzerland’s position of neutrality during the fight against the Nazis, and he was troubled by the accommodations his prosperous countrymen were willing to make after the war to maintain their comfortable detachment.

These concerns are crystallized in his 1956 play “The Visit,” a work that has some of the hallmarks of the absurdist comedies of the period but just as many differences. Dürrenmatt is more focused on moral than metaphysical questions. Wedekind and Kafka would seem to be bigger influences than Beckett and Ionesco.

In placing the problems of his age on the stage, Dürrenmatt combined tragedy and grotesque comedy, poignant drama and political farce. His mid-20th century style reflects both the European zeitgeist and his own exuberantly analytic big-picture sensibility. He loved crime stories in which the culprit was the slippery masses.

Revivals of “The Visit” are few and far between in my theatergoing experience. The play was turned into a musical by playwright Terrence McNally and the legendary Broadway songwriting duo of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and you’re more likely to see that version these days than the dramatic source that inspired it.

To give Dürrenmatt his due, Pasadena Playhouse has reassembled key components of the team that made “Amadeus” one of the best productions of the first half of 2026. Director Darko Tresnjak and lead actor Jefferson Mays deliver a revival of “The Visit,” in an English-language adaptation by Maurice Valency, that filled me with gratitude — gratitude for the high-level production, gratitude for making the case for why the play still matters, and gratitude for the opportunity of allowing us to make up our own minds about whether the work earns its designation as a modern classic.

Just as there’s no denying the popular place in the repertoire of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” there’s no gainsaying the durable position in the canon of Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit.” Yet I wouldn’t rank the play with Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” or Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” two pillars of mid-20th century European drama.

“The Visit,” set in motion by a gripping premise, slightly overstays its welcome. Claire Zachanassian (Melinda Page Hamilton, in fabulous diva mode), an imperiously wealthy woman, returns to her hometown of Gullen, a once prosperous industrial center, now a down-and-out backwater, described by townsfolk as “the poorest,” “the dreariest,” “the lousiest,” “God-forsaken hole between Venice and Stockholm.”

The grandees of Gullen have set their hopes on Claire’s bankrolling their faltering community’s recovery. They’re planning to pull out all the stops when she arrives at the station. But she’s so loaded, she doesn’t abide by existing train schedules and surprises them all by stopping a train that is supposed to bypass the town.

It’s only the first of many shocks that Claire has in store for the good people of Gullen. As she endures the overzealous hospitality orchestrated by the anxious Burgomeister (John Lavelle, bringing a more bureaucratic version of the audacious camp that distinguished his performance in “Amadeus”), she reacquaints herself with her former schoolteacher (Christian Barillas) and asks the doctor (Matthew Henerson), curiously and pointedly, if he’s the one who signs the death certificates.

Ricardo Chavira and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Traveling with a coffin and a caged panther, Claire hasn’t come alone. Her entourage includes her latest fiancé, Pedro (Ian Joseph Paget), a Brazilian playboy who struts around shirtless, and Bobby (Ryan W. Garcia), her personal fixer who’s always prepared to stamp out trouble with a check. There are also two muscle men clad in leather who look like they’re headed out to a dungeon or a gay rave (Danny Cron and Will Pellegrini) as well as two Rumpelstiltskin-like blind men (Jake Levy and Lauren Worsham), who tease a secret that will be told when madam tells them it’s time.

Anton Schill (Mays), a middle-aged proprietor in line to become the next burgomeister (our equivalent of mayor), is the real reason Claire has returned. Former lovers, they cannot conceal from themselves or each other the depth of their old attachment.

The hope is that Anton will persuade Claire to rescue Gullen with her fortune. But Mays plays the role with moving sincerity. His Anton is spellbound by the woman he used to call “little witch” and “panther,” nicknames that will take on more significance after Claire lays down the condition on which she will deliver to Gullen and its inhabitants a life-changing amount of money.

Ricardo Chavira, Adrian LaTourelle, Jefferson Mays, John Lavelle and Matthew Henerson in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

That condition is revenge, or what she angrily refers to as “justice.” She will hand over a billion marks if Gullen punishes Anton for impregnating her and then lying about his responsibility, a betrayal that resulted in her being cast out of the town, forced to give up the baby and consigned to work in a brothel, where her fortunes eventually turned.

At first Burgomeister is aghast at such a horrific proposal and rebuffs her offer. But Claire knows the people of Gullen better than he does. Seduced by the prospect of extraordinary affluence, they start buying luxuries on credit. New shoes and outfits in sherbet-like pastels (the vibrant work of costume designer Charlotte Devaux), imported tobacco and butter and expensive cognac, none of which they can afford.

Anton’s own family goes on a manic spree. His store is modernized and restocked. Money hijacks morality, a sight all-too-familiar in an America in which oligarchs assume that they can buy elections and voters are prepared to ignore the most egregious anti-democratic behavior as long as the stock market goes up.

Theater critic Kenneth Tynan argued that the play is “really a satire on bourgeois democracy,” not just greed. And that the feverish plot builds to a serious question: “At what point does economic necessity turn democracy into a hoax?”

John Lavelle and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Such an inquiry is devastatingly resonant today. But the fact that one can articulate the problem so concisely is perhaps why “The Visit” sags a bit in the middle. It’s possible to get ahead of the playwright, even for a work of such scrupulous intelligence and theatrical daring.

Some of the ways that Tresnjak ups the ante on that daring have diminishing returns. The club music that accompanies Claire’s bodybuilder retinue is funny the first time; less so on subsequent bursts. The gay-inflected camp loses steam, and I wondered about the production’s insistence on modernizing Gullen with modern technology and media, changes that become more conspicuous when consumerism takes over the town.

Surely a play can exist in its own fictional time. Choices, of course, have to be made, and timidity won’t get the job done. As Peter Brook, who directed the 1958 Broadway premiere starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, wrote in “The Empty Space,” “If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound.” But trusting audiences to detect modern parallels on their own might be an even more powerful strategy these days.

Melinda Page Hamilton, Jefferson Mays and ensemble in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Fortunately, “The Visit” does speak clearly in Tresnjak’s production, beautifully arrayed on scenic designer Alexander Dodge’s inventive simulacrum of the town. The physical staging, featuring Aaron Rhyne’s projections, Matthew Richards’ lighting and Jonathan Burke’s sound design, is as imaginative as it is impressively extravagant.

Yet what stands out most about the production are the quiet moments between Mays’ Anton and Hamilton’s Claire. When they reconnect, it’s as if for a brief moment all the hopes of their youth are returned to them. Hamilton lets down Claire’s savage hauteur; Mays’ eyes glisten with all the regrets of lost love.

The conflict between these characters is greater than the morality tale engulfing them. It’s the one element of the play that escapes Dürrenmatt’s strict literary control. Of course the playwright has prepared the way, but the wayward emotions emanating from these inwardly glowing performances are refreshing in work that has the crisp, circumscribed elegance of a mathematical proof.

Writing in the wake of World War II, Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt returned again and again to the subject of guilt. He was haunted by Switzerland’s position of neutrality during the fight against the Nazis, and he was troubled by the accommodations his prosperous countrymen were willing to make after the war to maintain their comfortable detachment.

These concerns are crystallized in his 1956 play “The Visit,” a work that has some of the hallmarks of the absurdist comedies of the period but just as many differences. Dürrenmatt is more focused on moral than metaphysical questions. Wedekind and Kafka would seem to be bigger influences than Beckett and Ionesco.

In placing the problems of his age on the stage, Dürrenmatt combined tragedy and grotesque comedy, poignant drama and political farce. His mid-20th century style reflects both the European zeitgeist and his own exuberantly analytic big-picture sensibility. He loved crime stories in which the culprit was the slippery masses.

Revivals of “The Visit” are few and far between in my theatergoing experience. The play was turned into a musical by playwright Terrence McNally and the legendary Broadway songwriting duo of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and you’re more likely to see that version these days than the dramatic source that inspired it.

To give Dürrenmatt his due, Pasadena Playhouse has reassembled key components of the team that made “Amadeus” one of the best productions of the first half of 2026. Director Darko Tresnjak and lead actor Jefferson Mays deliver a revival of “The Visit,” in an English-language adaptation by Maurice Valency, that filled me with gratitude — gratitude for the high-level production, gratitude for making the case for why the play still matters, and gratitude for the opportunity of allowing us to make up our own minds about whether the work earns its designation as a modern classic.

Just as there’s no denying the popular place in the repertoire of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” there’s no gainsaying the durable position in the canon of Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit.” Yet I wouldn’t rank the play with Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” or Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” two pillars of mid-20th century European drama.

“The Visit,” set in motion by a gripping premise, slightly overstays its welcome. Claire Zachanassian (Melinda Page Hamilton, in fabulous diva mode), an imperiously wealthy woman, returns to her hometown of Gullen, a once prosperous industrial center, now a down-and-out backwater, described by townsfolk as “the poorest,” “the dreariest,” “the lousiest,” “God-forsaken hole between Venice and Stockholm.”

The grandees of Gullen have set their hopes on Claire’s bankrolling their faltering community’s recovery. They’re planning to pull out all the stops when she arrives at the station. But she’s so loaded, she doesn’t abide by existing train schedules and surprises them all by stopping a train that is supposed to bypass the town.

It’s only the first of many shocks that Claire has in store for the good people of Gullen. As she endures the overzealous hospitality orchestrated by the anxious Burgomeister (John Lavelle, bringing a more bureaucratic version of the audacious camp that distinguished his performance in “Amadeus”), she reacquaints herself with her former schoolteacher (Christian Barillas) and asks the doctor (Matthew Henerson), curiously and pointedly, if he’s the one who signs the death certificates.

Ricardo Chavira and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Traveling with a coffin and a caged panther, Claire hasn’t come alone. Her entourage includes her latest fiancé, Pedro (Ian Joseph Paget), a Brazilian playboy who struts around shirtless, and Bobby (Ryan W. Garcia), her personal fixer who’s always prepared to stamp out trouble with a check. There are also two muscle men clad in leather who look like they’re headed out to a dungeon or a gay rave (Danny Cron and Will Pellegrini) as well as two Rumpelstiltskin-like blind men (Jake Levy and Lauren Worsham), who tease a secret that will be told when madam tells them it’s time.

Anton Schill (Mays), a middle-aged proprietor in line to become the next burgomeister (our equivalent of mayor), is the real reason Claire has returned. Former lovers, they cannot conceal from themselves or each other the depth of their old attachment.

The hope is that Anton will persuade Claire to rescue Gullen with her fortune. But Mays plays the role with moving sincerity. His Anton is spellbound by the woman he used to call “little witch” and “panther,” nicknames that will take on more significance after Claire lays down the condition on which she will deliver to Gullen and its inhabitants a life-changing amount of money.

Ricardo Chavira, Adrian LaTourelle, Jefferson Mays, John Lavelle and Matthew Henerson in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

That condition is revenge, or what she angrily refers to as “justice.” She will hand over a billion marks if Gullen punishes Anton for impregnating her and then lying about his responsibility, a betrayal that resulted in her being cast out of the town, forced to give up the baby and consigned to work in a brothel, where her fortunes eventually turned.

At first Burgomeister is aghast at such a horrific proposal and rebuffs her offer. But Claire knows the people of Gullen better than he does. Seduced by the prospect of extraordinary affluence, they start buying luxuries on credit. New shoes and outfits in sherbet-like pastels (the vibrant work of costume designer Charlotte Devaux), imported tobacco and butter and expensive cognac, none of which they can afford.

Anton’s own family goes on a manic spree. His store is modernized and restocked. Money hijacks morality, a sight all-too-familiar in an America in which oligarchs assume that they can buy elections and voters are prepared to ignore the most egregious anti-democratic behavior as long as the stock market goes up.

Theater critic Kenneth Tynan argued that the play is “really a satire on bourgeois democracy,” not just greed. And that the feverish plot builds to a serious question: “At what point does economic necessity turn democracy into a hoax?”

John Lavelle and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Such an inquiry is devastatingly resonant today. But the fact that one can articulate the problem so concisely is perhaps why “The Visit” sags a bit in the middle. It’s possible to get ahead of the playwright, even for a work of such scrupulous intelligence and theatrical daring.

Some of the ways that Tresnjak ups the ante on that daring have diminishing returns. The club music that accompanies Claire’s bodybuilder retinue is funny the first time; less so on subsequent bursts. The gay-inflected camp loses steam, and I wondered about the production’s insistence on modernizing Gullen with modern technology and media, changes that become more conspicuous when consumerism takes over the town.

Surely a play can exist in its own fictional time. Choices, of course, have to be made, and timidity won’t get the job done. As Peter Brook, who directed the 1958 Broadway premiere starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, wrote in “The Empty Space,” “If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound.” But trusting audiences to detect modern parallels on their own might be an even more powerful strategy these days.

Melinda Page Hamilton, Jefferson Mays and ensemble in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Fortunately, “The Visit” does speak clearly in Tresnjak’s production, beautifully arrayed on scenic designer Alexander Dodge’s inventive simulacrum of the town. The physical staging, featuring Aaron Rhyne’s projections, Matthew Richards’ lighting and Jonathan Burke’s sound design, is as imaginative as it is impressively extravagant.

Yet what stands out most about the production are the quiet moments between Mays’ Anton and Hamilton’s Claire. When they reconnect, it’s as if for a brief moment all the hopes of their youth are returned to them. Hamilton lets down Claire’s savage hauteur; Mays’ eyes glisten with all the regrets of lost love.

The conflict between these characters is greater than the morality tale engulfing them. It’s the one element of the play that escapes Dürrenmatt’s strict literary control. Of course the playwright has prepared the way, but the wayward emotions emanating from these inwardly glowing performances are refreshing in work that has the crisp, circumscribed elegance of a mathematical proof.

Writing in the wake of World War II, Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt returned again and again to the subject of guilt. He was haunted by Switzerland’s position of neutrality during the fight against the Nazis, and he was troubled by the accommodations his prosperous countrymen were willing to make after the war to maintain their comfortable detachment.

These concerns are crystallized in his 1956 play “The Visit,” a work that has some of the hallmarks of the absurdist comedies of the period but just as many differences. Dürrenmatt is more focused on moral than metaphysical questions. Wedekind and Kafka would seem to be bigger influences than Beckett and Ionesco.

In placing the problems of his age on the stage, Dürrenmatt combined tragedy and grotesque comedy, poignant drama and political farce. His mid-20th century style reflects both the European zeitgeist and his own exuberantly analytic big-picture sensibility. He loved crime stories in which the culprit was the slippery masses.

Revivals of “The Visit” are few and far between in my theatergoing experience. The play was turned into a musical by playwright Terrence McNally and the legendary Broadway songwriting duo of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and you’re more likely to see that version these days than the dramatic source that inspired it.

To give Dürrenmatt his due, Pasadena Playhouse has reassembled key components of the team that made “Amadeus” one of the best productions of the first half of 2026. Director Darko Tresnjak and lead actor Jefferson Mays deliver a revival of “The Visit,” in an English-language adaptation by Maurice Valency, that filled me with gratitude — gratitude for the high-level production, gratitude for making the case for why the play still matters, and gratitude for the opportunity of allowing us to make up our own minds about whether the work earns its designation as a modern classic.

Just as there’s no denying the popular place in the repertoire of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” there’s no gainsaying the durable position in the canon of Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit.” Yet I wouldn’t rank the play with Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” or Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” two pillars of mid-20th century European drama.

“The Visit,” set in motion by a gripping premise, slightly overstays its welcome. Claire Zachanassian (Melinda Page Hamilton, in fabulous diva mode), an imperiously wealthy woman, returns to her hometown of Gullen, a once prosperous industrial center, now a down-and-out backwater, described by townsfolk as “the poorest,” “the dreariest,” “the lousiest,” “God-forsaken hole between Venice and Stockholm.”

The grandees of Gullen have set their hopes on Claire’s bankrolling their faltering community’s recovery. They’re planning to pull out all the stops when she arrives at the station. But she’s so loaded, she doesn’t abide by existing train schedules and surprises them all by stopping a train that is supposed to bypass the town.

It’s only the first of many shocks that Claire has in store for the good people of Gullen. As she endures the overzealous hospitality orchestrated by the anxious Burgomeister (John Lavelle, bringing a more bureaucratic version of the audacious camp that distinguished his performance in “Amadeus”), she reacquaints herself with her former schoolteacher (Christian Barillas) and asks the doctor (Matthew Henerson), curiously and pointedly, if he’s the one who signs the death certificates.

Ricardo Chavira and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Traveling with a coffin and a caged panther, Claire hasn’t come alone. Her entourage includes her latest fiancé, Pedro (Ian Joseph Paget), a Brazilian playboy who struts around shirtless, and Bobby (Ryan W. Garcia), her personal fixer who’s always prepared to stamp out trouble with a check. There are also two muscle men clad in leather who look like they’re headed out to a dungeon or a gay rave (Danny Cron and Will Pellegrini) as well as two Rumpelstiltskin-like blind men (Jake Levy and Lauren Worsham), who tease a secret that will be told when madam tells them it’s time.

Anton Schill (Mays), a middle-aged proprietor in line to become the next burgomeister (our equivalent of mayor), is the real reason Claire has returned. Former lovers, they cannot conceal from themselves or each other the depth of their old attachment.

The hope is that Anton will persuade Claire to rescue Gullen with her fortune. But Mays plays the role with moving sincerity. His Anton is spellbound by the woman he used to call “little witch” and “panther,” nicknames that will take on more significance after Claire lays down the condition on which she will deliver to Gullen and its inhabitants a life-changing amount of money.

Ricardo Chavira, Adrian LaTourelle, Jefferson Mays, John Lavelle and Matthew Henerson in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

That condition is revenge, or what she angrily refers to as “justice.” She will hand over a billion marks if Gullen punishes Anton for impregnating her and then lying about his responsibility, a betrayal that resulted in her being cast out of the town, forced to give up the baby and consigned to work in a brothel, where her fortunes eventually turned.

At first Burgomeister is aghast at such a horrific proposal and rebuffs her offer. But Claire knows the people of Gullen better than he does. Seduced by the prospect of extraordinary affluence, they start buying luxuries on credit. New shoes and outfits in sherbet-like pastels (the vibrant work of costume designer Charlotte Devaux), imported tobacco and butter and expensive cognac, none of which they can afford.

Anton’s own family goes on a manic spree. His store is modernized and restocked. Money hijacks morality, a sight all-too-familiar in an America in which oligarchs assume that they can buy elections and voters are prepared to ignore the most egregious anti-democratic behavior as long as the stock market goes up.

Theater critic Kenneth Tynan argued that the play is “really a satire on bourgeois democracy,” not just greed. And that the feverish plot builds to a serious question: “At what point does economic necessity turn democracy into a hoax?”

John Lavelle and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Such an inquiry is devastatingly resonant today. But the fact that one can articulate the problem so concisely is perhaps why “The Visit” sags a bit in the middle. It’s possible to get ahead of the playwright, even for a work of such scrupulous intelligence and theatrical daring.

Some of the ways that Tresnjak ups the ante on that daring have diminishing returns. The club music that accompanies Claire’s bodybuilder retinue is funny the first time; less so on subsequent bursts. The gay-inflected camp loses steam, and I wondered about the production’s insistence on modernizing Gullen with modern technology and media, changes that become more conspicuous when consumerism takes over the town.

Surely a play can exist in its own fictional time. Choices, of course, have to be made, and timidity won’t get the job done. As Peter Brook, who directed the 1958 Broadway premiere starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, wrote in “The Empty Space,” “If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound.” But trusting audiences to detect modern parallels on their own might be an even more powerful strategy these days.

Melinda Page Hamilton, Jefferson Mays and ensemble in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Fortunately, “The Visit” does speak clearly in Tresnjak’s production, beautifully arrayed on scenic designer Alexander Dodge’s inventive simulacrum of the town. The physical staging, featuring Aaron Rhyne’s projections, Matthew Richards’ lighting and Jonathan Burke’s sound design, is as imaginative as it is impressively extravagant.

Yet what stands out most about the production are the quiet moments between Mays’ Anton and Hamilton’s Claire. When they reconnect, it’s as if for a brief moment all the hopes of their youth are returned to them. Hamilton lets down Claire’s savage hauteur; Mays’ eyes glisten with all the regrets of lost love.

The conflict between these characters is greater than the morality tale engulfing them. It’s the one element of the play that escapes Dürrenmatt’s strict literary control. Of course the playwright has prepared the way, but the wayward emotions emanating from these inwardly glowing performances are refreshing in work that has the crisp, circumscribed elegance of a mathematical proof.

Writing in the wake of World War II, Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt returned again and again to the subject of guilt. He was haunted by Switzerland’s position of neutrality during the fight against the Nazis, and he was troubled by the accommodations his prosperous countrymen were willing to make after the war to maintain their comfortable detachment.

These concerns are crystallized in his 1956 play “The Visit,” a work that has some of the hallmarks of the absurdist comedies of the period but just as many differences. Dürrenmatt is more focused on moral than metaphysical questions. Wedekind and Kafka would seem to be bigger influences than Beckett and Ionesco.

In placing the problems of his age on the stage, Dürrenmatt combined tragedy and grotesque comedy, poignant drama and political farce. His mid-20th century style reflects both the European zeitgeist and his own exuberantly analytic big-picture sensibility. He loved crime stories in which the culprit was the slippery masses.

Revivals of “The Visit” are few and far between in my theatergoing experience. The play was turned into a musical by playwright Terrence McNally and the legendary Broadway songwriting duo of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and you’re more likely to see that version these days than the dramatic source that inspired it.

To give Dürrenmatt his due, Pasadena Playhouse has reassembled key components of the team that made “Amadeus” one of the best productions of the first half of 2026. Director Darko Tresnjak and lead actor Jefferson Mays deliver a revival of “The Visit,” in an English-language adaptation by Maurice Valency, that filled me with gratitude — gratitude for the high-level production, gratitude for making the case for why the play still matters, and gratitude for the opportunity of allowing us to make up our own minds about whether the work earns its designation as a modern classic.

Just as there’s no denying the popular place in the repertoire of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” there’s no gainsaying the durable position in the canon of Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit.” Yet I wouldn’t rank the play with Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” or Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” two pillars of mid-20th century European drama.

“The Visit,” set in motion by a gripping premise, slightly overstays its welcome. Claire Zachanassian (Melinda Page Hamilton, in fabulous diva mode), an imperiously wealthy woman, returns to her hometown of Gullen, a once prosperous industrial center, now a down-and-out backwater, described by townsfolk as “the poorest,” “the dreariest,” “the lousiest,” “God-forsaken hole between Venice and Stockholm.”

The grandees of Gullen have set their hopes on Claire’s bankrolling their faltering community’s recovery. They’re planning to pull out all the stops when she arrives at the station. But she’s so loaded, she doesn’t abide by existing train schedules and surprises them all by stopping a train that is supposed to bypass the town.

It’s only the first of many shocks that Claire has in store for the good people of Gullen. As she endures the overzealous hospitality orchestrated by the anxious Burgomeister (John Lavelle, bringing a more bureaucratic version of the audacious camp that distinguished his performance in “Amadeus”), she reacquaints herself with her former schoolteacher (Christian Barillas) and asks the doctor (Matthew Henerson), curiously and pointedly, if he’s the one who signs the death certificates.

Ricardo Chavira and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Traveling with a coffin and a caged panther, Claire hasn’t come alone. Her entourage includes her latest fiancé, Pedro (Ian Joseph Paget), a Brazilian playboy who struts around shirtless, and Bobby (Ryan W. Garcia), her personal fixer who’s always prepared to stamp out trouble with a check. There are also two muscle men clad in leather who look like they’re headed out to a dungeon or a gay rave (Danny Cron and Will Pellegrini) as well as two Rumpelstiltskin-like blind men (Jake Levy and Lauren Worsham), who tease a secret that will be told when madam tells them it’s time.

Anton Schill (Mays), a middle-aged proprietor in line to become the next burgomeister (our equivalent of mayor), is the real reason Claire has returned. Former lovers, they cannot conceal from themselves or each other the depth of their old attachment.

The hope is that Anton will persuade Claire to rescue Gullen with her fortune. But Mays plays the role with moving sincerity. His Anton is spellbound by the woman he used to call “little witch” and “panther,” nicknames that will take on more significance after Claire lays down the condition on which she will deliver to Gullen and its inhabitants a life-changing amount of money.

Ricardo Chavira, Adrian LaTourelle, Jefferson Mays, John Lavelle and Matthew Henerson in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

That condition is revenge, or what she angrily refers to as “justice.” She will hand over a billion marks if Gullen punishes Anton for impregnating her and then lying about his responsibility, a betrayal that resulted in her being cast out of the town, forced to give up the baby and consigned to work in a brothel, where her fortunes eventually turned.

At first Burgomeister is aghast at such a horrific proposal and rebuffs her offer. But Claire knows the people of Gullen better than he does. Seduced by the prospect of extraordinary affluence, they start buying luxuries on credit. New shoes and outfits in sherbet-like pastels (the vibrant work of costume designer Charlotte Devaux), imported tobacco and butter and expensive cognac, none of which they can afford.

Anton’s own family goes on a manic spree. His store is modernized and restocked. Money hijacks morality, a sight all-too-familiar in an America in which oligarchs assume that they can buy elections and voters are prepared to ignore the most egregious anti-democratic behavior as long as the stock market goes up.

Theater critic Kenneth Tynan argued that the play is “really a satire on bourgeois democracy,” not just greed. And that the feverish plot builds to a serious question: “At what point does economic necessity turn democracy into a hoax?”

John Lavelle and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Such an inquiry is devastatingly resonant today. But the fact that one can articulate the problem so concisely is perhaps why “The Visit” sags a bit in the middle. It’s possible to get ahead of the playwright, even for a work of such scrupulous intelligence and theatrical daring.

Some of the ways that Tresnjak ups the ante on that daring have diminishing returns. The club music that accompanies Claire’s bodybuilder retinue is funny the first time; less so on subsequent bursts. The gay-inflected camp loses steam, and I wondered about the production’s insistence on modernizing Gullen with modern technology and media, changes that become more conspicuous when consumerism takes over the town.

Surely a play can exist in its own fictional time. Choices, of course, have to be made, and timidity won’t get the job done. As Peter Brook, who directed the 1958 Broadway premiere starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, wrote in “The Empty Space,” “If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound.” But trusting audiences to detect modern parallels on their own might be an even more powerful strategy these days.

Melinda Page Hamilton, Jefferson Mays and ensemble in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Fortunately, “The Visit” does speak clearly in Tresnjak’s production, beautifully arrayed on scenic designer Alexander Dodge’s inventive simulacrum of the town. The physical staging, featuring Aaron Rhyne’s projections, Matthew Richards’ lighting and Jonathan Burke’s sound design, is as imaginative as it is impressively extravagant.

Yet what stands out most about the production are the quiet moments between Mays’ Anton and Hamilton’s Claire. When they reconnect, it’s as if for a brief moment all the hopes of their youth are returned to them. Hamilton lets down Claire’s savage hauteur; Mays’ eyes glisten with all the regrets of lost love.

The conflict between these characters is greater than the morality tale engulfing them. It’s the one element of the play that escapes Dürrenmatt’s strict literary control. Of course the playwright has prepared the way, but the wayward emotions emanating from these inwardly glowing performances are refreshing in work that has the crisp, circumscribed elegance of a mathematical proof.

Writing in the wake of World War II, Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt returned again and again to the subject of guilt. He was haunted by Switzerland’s position of neutrality during the fight against the Nazis, and he was troubled by the accommodations his prosperous countrymen were willing to make after the war to maintain their comfortable detachment.

These concerns are crystallized in his 1956 play “The Visit,” a work that has some of the hallmarks of the absurdist comedies of the period but just as many differences. Dürrenmatt is more focused on moral than metaphysical questions. Wedekind and Kafka would seem to be bigger influences than Beckett and Ionesco.

In placing the problems of his age on the stage, Dürrenmatt combined tragedy and grotesque comedy, poignant drama and political farce. His mid-20th century style reflects both the European zeitgeist and his own exuberantly analytic big-picture sensibility. He loved crime stories in which the culprit was the slippery masses.

Revivals of “The Visit” are few and far between in my theatergoing experience. The play was turned into a musical by playwright Terrence McNally and the legendary Broadway songwriting duo of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and you’re more likely to see that version these days than the dramatic source that inspired it.

To give Dürrenmatt his due, Pasadena Playhouse has reassembled key components of the team that made “Amadeus” one of the best productions of the first half of 2026. Director Darko Tresnjak and lead actor Jefferson Mays deliver a revival of “The Visit,” in an English-language adaptation by Maurice Valency, that filled me with gratitude — gratitude for the high-level production, gratitude for making the case for why the play still matters, and gratitude for the opportunity of allowing us to make up our own minds about whether the work earns its designation as a modern classic.

Just as there’s no denying the popular place in the repertoire of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” there’s no gainsaying the durable position in the canon of Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit.” Yet I wouldn’t rank the play with Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” or Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” two pillars of mid-20th century European drama.

“The Visit,” set in motion by a gripping premise, slightly overstays its welcome. Claire Zachanassian (Melinda Page Hamilton, in fabulous diva mode), an imperiously wealthy woman, returns to her hometown of Gullen, a once prosperous industrial center, now a down-and-out backwater, described by townsfolk as “the poorest,” “the dreariest,” “the lousiest,” “God-forsaken hole between Venice and Stockholm.”

The grandees of Gullen have set their hopes on Claire’s bankrolling their faltering community’s recovery. They’re planning to pull out all the stops when she arrives at the station. But she’s so loaded, she doesn’t abide by existing train schedules and surprises them all by stopping a train that is supposed to bypass the town.

It’s only the first of many shocks that Claire has in store for the good people of Gullen. As she endures the overzealous hospitality orchestrated by the anxious Burgomeister (John Lavelle, bringing a more bureaucratic version of the audacious camp that distinguished his performance in “Amadeus”), she reacquaints herself with her former schoolteacher (Christian Barillas) and asks the doctor (Matthew Henerson), curiously and pointedly, if he’s the one who signs the death certificates.

Ricardo Chavira and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Traveling with a coffin and a caged panther, Claire hasn’t come alone. Her entourage includes her latest fiancé, Pedro (Ian Joseph Paget), a Brazilian playboy who struts around shirtless, and Bobby (Ryan W. Garcia), her personal fixer who’s always prepared to stamp out trouble with a check. There are also two muscle men clad in leather who look like they’re headed out to a dungeon or a gay rave (Danny Cron and Will Pellegrini) as well as two Rumpelstiltskin-like blind men (Jake Levy and Lauren Worsham), who tease a secret that will be told when madam tells them it’s time.

Anton Schill (Mays), a middle-aged proprietor in line to become the next burgomeister (our equivalent of mayor), is the real reason Claire has returned. Former lovers, they cannot conceal from themselves or each other the depth of their old attachment.

The hope is that Anton will persuade Claire to rescue Gullen with her fortune. But Mays plays the role with moving sincerity. His Anton is spellbound by the woman he used to call “little witch” and “panther,” nicknames that will take on more significance after Claire lays down the condition on which she will deliver to Gullen and its inhabitants a life-changing amount of money.

Ricardo Chavira, Adrian LaTourelle, Jefferson Mays, John Lavelle and Matthew Henerson in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

That condition is revenge, or what she angrily refers to as “justice.” She will hand over a billion marks if Gullen punishes Anton for impregnating her and then lying about his responsibility, a betrayal that resulted in her being cast out of the town, forced to give up the baby and consigned to work in a brothel, where her fortunes eventually turned.

At first Burgomeister is aghast at such a horrific proposal and rebuffs her offer. But Claire knows the people of Gullen better than he does. Seduced by the prospect of extraordinary affluence, they start buying luxuries on credit. New shoes and outfits in sherbet-like pastels (the vibrant work of costume designer Charlotte Devaux), imported tobacco and butter and expensive cognac, none of which they can afford.

Anton’s own family goes on a manic spree. His store is modernized and restocked. Money hijacks morality, a sight all-too-familiar in an America in which oligarchs assume that they can buy elections and voters are prepared to ignore the most egregious anti-democratic behavior as long as the stock market goes up.

Theater critic Kenneth Tynan argued that the play is “really a satire on bourgeois democracy,” not just greed. And that the feverish plot builds to a serious question: “At what point does economic necessity turn democracy into a hoax?”

John Lavelle and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Such an inquiry is devastatingly resonant today. But the fact that one can articulate the problem so concisely is perhaps why “The Visit” sags a bit in the middle. It’s possible to get ahead of the playwright, even for a work of such scrupulous intelligence and theatrical daring.

Some of the ways that Tresnjak ups the ante on that daring have diminishing returns. The club music that accompanies Claire’s bodybuilder retinue is funny the first time; less so on subsequent bursts. The gay-inflected camp loses steam, and I wondered about the production’s insistence on modernizing Gullen with modern technology and media, changes that become more conspicuous when consumerism takes over the town.

Surely a play can exist in its own fictional time. Choices, of course, have to be made, and timidity won’t get the job done. As Peter Brook, who directed the 1958 Broadway premiere starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, wrote in “The Empty Space,” “If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound.” But trusting audiences to detect modern parallels on their own might be an even more powerful strategy these days.

Melinda Page Hamilton, Jefferson Mays and ensemble in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Fortunately, “The Visit” does speak clearly in Tresnjak’s production, beautifully arrayed on scenic designer Alexander Dodge’s inventive simulacrum of the town. The physical staging, featuring Aaron Rhyne’s projections, Matthew Richards’ lighting and Jonathan Burke’s sound design, is as imaginative as it is impressively extravagant.

Yet what stands out most about the production are the quiet moments between Mays’ Anton and Hamilton’s Claire. When they reconnect, it’s as if for a brief moment all the hopes of their youth are returned to them. Hamilton lets down Claire’s savage hauteur; Mays’ eyes glisten with all the regrets of lost love.

The conflict between these characters is greater than the morality tale engulfing them. It’s the one element of the play that escapes Dürrenmatt’s strict literary control. Of course the playwright has prepared the way, but the wayward emotions emanating from these inwardly glowing performances are refreshing in work that has the crisp, circumscribed elegance of a mathematical proof.

Writing in the wake of World War II, Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt returned again and again to the subject of guilt. He was haunted by Switzerland’s position of neutrality during the fight against the Nazis, and he was troubled by the accommodations his prosperous countrymen were willing to make after the war to maintain their comfortable detachment.

These concerns are crystallized in his 1956 play “The Visit,” a work that has some of the hallmarks of the absurdist comedies of the period but just as many differences. Dürrenmatt is more focused on moral than metaphysical questions. Wedekind and Kafka would seem to be bigger influences than Beckett and Ionesco.

In placing the problems of his age on the stage, Dürrenmatt combined tragedy and grotesque comedy, poignant drama and political farce. His mid-20th century style reflects both the European zeitgeist and his own exuberantly analytic big-picture sensibility. He loved crime stories in which the culprit was the slippery masses.

Revivals of “The Visit” are few and far between in my theatergoing experience. The play was turned into a musical by playwright Terrence McNally and the legendary Broadway songwriting duo of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and you’re more likely to see that version these days than the dramatic source that inspired it.

To give Dürrenmatt his due, Pasadena Playhouse has reassembled key components of the team that made “Amadeus” one of the best productions of the first half of 2026. Director Darko Tresnjak and lead actor Jefferson Mays deliver a revival of “The Visit,” in an English-language adaptation by Maurice Valency, that filled me with gratitude — gratitude for the high-level production, gratitude for making the case for why the play still matters, and gratitude for the opportunity of allowing us to make up our own minds about whether the work earns its designation as a modern classic.

Just as there’s no denying the popular place in the repertoire of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” there’s no gainsaying the durable position in the canon of Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit.” Yet I wouldn’t rank the play with Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” or Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” two pillars of mid-20th century European drama.

“The Visit,” set in motion by a gripping premise, slightly overstays its welcome. Claire Zachanassian (Melinda Page Hamilton, in fabulous diva mode), an imperiously wealthy woman, returns to her hometown of Gullen, a once prosperous industrial center, now a down-and-out backwater, described by townsfolk as “the poorest,” “the dreariest,” “the lousiest,” “God-forsaken hole between Venice and Stockholm.”

The grandees of Gullen have set their hopes on Claire’s bankrolling their faltering community’s recovery. They’re planning to pull out all the stops when she arrives at the station. But she’s so loaded, she doesn’t abide by existing train schedules and surprises them all by stopping a train that is supposed to bypass the town.

It’s only the first of many shocks that Claire has in store for the good people of Gullen. As she endures the overzealous hospitality orchestrated by the anxious Burgomeister (John Lavelle, bringing a more bureaucratic version of the audacious camp that distinguished his performance in “Amadeus”), she reacquaints herself with her former schoolteacher (Christian Barillas) and asks the doctor (Matthew Henerson), curiously and pointedly, if he’s the one who signs the death certificates.

Ricardo Chavira and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Traveling with a coffin and a caged panther, Claire hasn’t come alone. Her entourage includes her latest fiancé, Pedro (Ian Joseph Paget), a Brazilian playboy who struts around shirtless, and Bobby (Ryan W. Garcia), her personal fixer who’s always prepared to stamp out trouble with a check. There are also two muscle men clad in leather who look like they’re headed out to a dungeon or a gay rave (Danny Cron and Will Pellegrini) as well as two Rumpelstiltskin-like blind men (Jake Levy and Lauren Worsham), who tease a secret that will be told when madam tells them it’s time.

Anton Schill (Mays), a middle-aged proprietor in line to become the next burgomeister (our equivalent of mayor), is the real reason Claire has returned. Former lovers, they cannot conceal from themselves or each other the depth of their old attachment.

The hope is that Anton will persuade Claire to rescue Gullen with her fortune. But Mays plays the role with moving sincerity. His Anton is spellbound by the woman he used to call “little witch” and “panther,” nicknames that will take on more significance after Claire lays down the condition on which she will deliver to Gullen and its inhabitants a life-changing amount of money.

Ricardo Chavira, Adrian LaTourelle, Jefferson Mays, John Lavelle and Matthew Henerson in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

That condition is revenge, or what she angrily refers to as “justice.” She will hand over a billion marks if Gullen punishes Anton for impregnating her and then lying about his responsibility, a betrayal that resulted in her being cast out of the town, forced to give up the baby and consigned to work in a brothel, where her fortunes eventually turned.

At first Burgomeister is aghast at such a horrific proposal and rebuffs her offer. But Claire knows the people of Gullen better than he does. Seduced by the prospect of extraordinary affluence, they start buying luxuries on credit. New shoes and outfits in sherbet-like pastels (the vibrant work of costume designer Charlotte Devaux), imported tobacco and butter and expensive cognac, none of which they can afford.

Anton’s own family goes on a manic spree. His store is modernized and restocked. Money hijacks morality, a sight all-too-familiar in an America in which oligarchs assume that they can buy elections and voters are prepared to ignore the most egregious anti-democratic behavior as long as the stock market goes up.

Theater critic Kenneth Tynan argued that the play is “really a satire on bourgeois democracy,” not just greed. And that the feverish plot builds to a serious question: “At what point does economic necessity turn democracy into a hoax?”

John Lavelle and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Such an inquiry is devastatingly resonant today. But the fact that one can articulate the problem so concisely is perhaps why “The Visit” sags a bit in the middle. It’s possible to get ahead of the playwright, even for a work of such scrupulous intelligence and theatrical daring.

Some of the ways that Tresnjak ups the ante on that daring have diminishing returns. The club music that accompanies Claire’s bodybuilder retinue is funny the first time; less so on subsequent bursts. The gay-inflected camp loses steam, and I wondered about the production’s insistence on modernizing Gullen with modern technology and media, changes that become more conspicuous when consumerism takes over the town.

Surely a play can exist in its own fictional time. Choices, of course, have to be made, and timidity won’t get the job done. As Peter Brook, who directed the 1958 Broadway premiere starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, wrote in “The Empty Space,” “If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound.” But trusting audiences to detect modern parallels on their own might be an even more powerful strategy these days.

Melinda Page Hamilton, Jefferson Mays and ensemble in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Fortunately, “The Visit” does speak clearly in Tresnjak’s production, beautifully arrayed on scenic designer Alexander Dodge’s inventive simulacrum of the town. The physical staging, featuring Aaron Rhyne’s projections, Matthew Richards’ lighting and Jonathan Burke’s sound design, is as imaginative as it is impressively extravagant.

Yet what stands out most about the production are the quiet moments between Mays’ Anton and Hamilton’s Claire. When they reconnect, it’s as if for a brief moment all the hopes of their youth are returned to them. Hamilton lets down Claire’s savage hauteur; Mays’ eyes glisten with all the regrets of lost love.

The conflict between these characters is greater than the morality tale engulfing them. It’s the one element of the play that escapes Dürrenmatt’s strict literary control. Of course the playwright has prepared the way, but the wayward emotions emanating from these inwardly glowing performances are refreshing in work that has the crisp, circumscribed elegance of a mathematical proof.

Writing in the wake of World War II, Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt returned again and again to the subject of guilt. He was haunted by Switzerland’s position of neutrality during the fight against the Nazis, and he was troubled by the accommodations his prosperous countrymen were willing to make after the war to maintain their comfortable detachment.

These concerns are crystallized in his 1956 play “The Visit,” a work that has some of the hallmarks of the absurdist comedies of the period but just as many differences. Dürrenmatt is more focused on moral than metaphysical questions. Wedekind and Kafka would seem to be bigger influences than Beckett and Ionesco.

In placing the problems of his age on the stage, Dürrenmatt combined tragedy and grotesque comedy, poignant drama and political farce. His mid-20th century style reflects both the European zeitgeist and his own exuberantly analytic big-picture sensibility. He loved crime stories in which the culprit was the slippery masses.

Revivals of “The Visit” are few and far between in my theatergoing experience. The play was turned into a musical by playwright Terrence McNally and the legendary Broadway songwriting duo of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and you’re more likely to see that version these days than the dramatic source that inspired it.

To give Dürrenmatt his due, Pasadena Playhouse has reassembled key components of the team that made “Amadeus” one of the best productions of the first half of 2026. Director Darko Tresnjak and lead actor Jefferson Mays deliver a revival of “The Visit,” in an English-language adaptation by Maurice Valency, that filled me with gratitude — gratitude for the high-level production, gratitude for making the case for why the play still matters, and gratitude for the opportunity of allowing us to make up our own minds about whether the work earns its designation as a modern classic.

Just as there’s no denying the popular place in the repertoire of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” there’s no gainsaying the durable position in the canon of Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit.” Yet I wouldn’t rank the play with Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” or Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” two pillars of mid-20th century European drama.

“The Visit,” set in motion by a gripping premise, slightly overstays its welcome. Claire Zachanassian (Melinda Page Hamilton, in fabulous diva mode), an imperiously wealthy woman, returns to her hometown of Gullen, a once prosperous industrial center, now a down-and-out backwater, described by townsfolk as “the poorest,” “the dreariest,” “the lousiest,” “God-forsaken hole between Venice and Stockholm.”

The grandees of Gullen have set their hopes on Claire’s bankrolling their faltering community’s recovery. They’re planning to pull out all the stops when she arrives at the station. But she’s so loaded, she doesn’t abide by existing train schedules and surprises them all by stopping a train that is supposed to bypass the town.

It’s only the first of many shocks that Claire has in store for the good people of Gullen. As she endures the overzealous hospitality orchestrated by the anxious Burgomeister (John Lavelle, bringing a more bureaucratic version of the audacious camp that distinguished his performance in “Amadeus”), she reacquaints herself with her former schoolteacher (Christian Barillas) and asks the doctor (Matthew Henerson), curiously and pointedly, if he’s the one who signs the death certificates.

Ricardo Chavira and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Traveling with a coffin and a caged panther, Claire hasn’t come alone. Her entourage includes her latest fiancé, Pedro (Ian Joseph Paget), a Brazilian playboy who struts around shirtless, and Bobby (Ryan W. Garcia), her personal fixer who’s always prepared to stamp out trouble with a check. There are also two muscle men clad in leather who look like they’re headed out to a dungeon or a gay rave (Danny Cron and Will Pellegrini) as well as two Rumpelstiltskin-like blind men (Jake Levy and Lauren Worsham), who tease a secret that will be told when madam tells them it’s time.

Anton Schill (Mays), a middle-aged proprietor in line to become the next burgomeister (our equivalent of mayor), is the real reason Claire has returned. Former lovers, they cannot conceal from themselves or each other the depth of their old attachment.

The hope is that Anton will persuade Claire to rescue Gullen with her fortune. But Mays plays the role with moving sincerity. His Anton is spellbound by the woman he used to call “little witch” and “panther,” nicknames that will take on more significance after Claire lays down the condition on which she will deliver to Gullen and its inhabitants a life-changing amount of money.

Ricardo Chavira, Adrian LaTourelle, Jefferson Mays, John Lavelle and Matthew Henerson in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

That condition is revenge, or what she angrily refers to as “justice.” She will hand over a billion marks if Gullen punishes Anton for impregnating her and then lying about his responsibility, a betrayal that resulted in her being cast out of the town, forced to give up the baby and consigned to work in a brothel, where her fortunes eventually turned.

At first Burgomeister is aghast at such a horrific proposal and rebuffs her offer. But Claire knows the people of Gullen better than he does. Seduced by the prospect of extraordinary affluence, they start buying luxuries on credit. New shoes and outfits in sherbet-like pastels (the vibrant work of costume designer Charlotte Devaux), imported tobacco and butter and expensive cognac, none of which they can afford.

Anton’s own family goes on a manic spree. His store is modernized and restocked. Money hijacks morality, a sight all-too-familiar in an America in which oligarchs assume that they can buy elections and voters are prepared to ignore the most egregious anti-democratic behavior as long as the stock market goes up.

Theater critic Kenneth Tynan argued that the play is “really a satire on bourgeois democracy,” not just greed. And that the feverish plot builds to a serious question: “At what point does economic necessity turn democracy into a hoax?”

John Lavelle and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Such an inquiry is devastatingly resonant today. But the fact that one can articulate the problem so concisely is perhaps why “The Visit” sags a bit in the middle. It’s possible to get ahead of the playwright, even for a work of such scrupulous intelligence and theatrical daring.

Some of the ways that Tresnjak ups the ante on that daring have diminishing returns. The club music that accompanies Claire’s bodybuilder retinue is funny the first time; less so on subsequent bursts. The gay-inflected camp loses steam, and I wondered about the production’s insistence on modernizing Gullen with modern technology and media, changes that become more conspicuous when consumerism takes over the town.

Surely a play can exist in its own fictional time. Choices, of course, have to be made, and timidity won’t get the job done. As Peter Brook, who directed the 1958 Broadway premiere starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, wrote in “The Empty Space,” “If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound.” But trusting audiences to detect modern parallels on their own might be an even more powerful strategy these days.

Melinda Page Hamilton, Jefferson Mays and ensemble in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Fortunately, “The Visit” does speak clearly in Tresnjak’s production, beautifully arrayed on scenic designer Alexander Dodge’s inventive simulacrum of the town. The physical staging, featuring Aaron Rhyne’s projections, Matthew Richards’ lighting and Jonathan Burke’s sound design, is as imaginative as it is impressively extravagant.

Yet what stands out most about the production are the quiet moments between Mays’ Anton and Hamilton’s Claire. When they reconnect, it’s as if for a brief moment all the hopes of their youth are returned to them. Hamilton lets down Claire’s savage hauteur; Mays’ eyes glisten with all the regrets of lost love.

The conflict between these characters is greater than the morality tale engulfing them. It’s the one element of the play that escapes Dürrenmatt’s strict literary control. Of course the playwright has prepared the way, but the wayward emotions emanating from these inwardly glowing performances are refreshing in work that has the crisp, circumscribed elegance of a mathematical proof.

Writing in the wake of World War II, Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt returned again and again to the subject of guilt. He was haunted by Switzerland’s position of neutrality during the fight against the Nazis, and he was troubled by the accommodations his prosperous countrymen were willing to make after the war to maintain their comfortable detachment.

These concerns are crystallized in his 1956 play “The Visit,” a work that has some of the hallmarks of the absurdist comedies of the period but just as many differences. Dürrenmatt is more focused on moral than metaphysical questions. Wedekind and Kafka would seem to be bigger influences than Beckett and Ionesco.

In placing the problems of his age on the stage, Dürrenmatt combined tragedy and grotesque comedy, poignant drama and political farce. His mid-20th century style reflects both the European zeitgeist and his own exuberantly analytic big-picture sensibility. He loved crime stories in which the culprit was the slippery masses.

Revivals of “The Visit” are few and far between in my theatergoing experience. The play was turned into a musical by playwright Terrence McNally and the legendary Broadway songwriting duo of John Kander and Fred Ebb, and you’re more likely to see that version these days than the dramatic source that inspired it.

To give Dürrenmatt his due, Pasadena Playhouse has reassembled key components of the team that made “Amadeus” one of the best productions of the first half of 2026. Director Darko Tresnjak and lead actor Jefferson Mays deliver a revival of “The Visit,” in an English-language adaptation by Maurice Valency, that filled me with gratitude — gratitude for the high-level production, gratitude for making the case for why the play still matters, and gratitude for the opportunity of allowing us to make up our own minds about whether the work earns its designation as a modern classic.

Just as there’s no denying the popular place in the repertoire of Peter Shaffer’s “Amadeus,” there’s no gainsaying the durable position in the canon of Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit.” Yet I wouldn’t rank the play with Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” or Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children,” two pillars of mid-20th century European drama.

“The Visit,” set in motion by a gripping premise, slightly overstays its welcome. Claire Zachanassian (Melinda Page Hamilton, in fabulous diva mode), an imperiously wealthy woman, returns to her hometown of Gullen, a once prosperous industrial center, now a down-and-out backwater, described by townsfolk as “the poorest,” “the dreariest,” “the lousiest,” “God-forsaken hole between Venice and Stockholm.”

The grandees of Gullen have set their hopes on Claire’s bankrolling their faltering community’s recovery. They’re planning to pull out all the stops when she arrives at the station. But she’s so loaded, she doesn’t abide by existing train schedules and surprises them all by stopping a train that is supposed to bypass the town.

It’s only the first of many shocks that Claire has in store for the good people of Gullen. As she endures the overzealous hospitality orchestrated by the anxious Burgomeister (John Lavelle, bringing a more bureaucratic version of the audacious camp that distinguished his performance in “Amadeus”), she reacquaints herself with her former schoolteacher (Christian Barillas) and asks the doctor (Matthew Henerson), curiously and pointedly, if he’s the one who signs the death certificates.

Ricardo Chavira and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Traveling with a coffin and a caged panther, Claire hasn’t come alone. Her entourage includes her latest fiancé, Pedro (Ian Joseph Paget), a Brazilian playboy who struts around shirtless, and Bobby (Ryan W. Garcia), her personal fixer who’s always prepared to stamp out trouble with a check. There are also two muscle men clad in leather who look like they’re headed out to a dungeon or a gay rave (Danny Cron and Will Pellegrini) as well as two Rumpelstiltskin-like blind men (Jake Levy and Lauren Worsham), who tease a secret that will be told when madam tells them it’s time.

Anton Schill (Mays), a middle-aged proprietor in line to become the next burgomeister (our equivalent of mayor), is the real reason Claire has returned. Former lovers, they cannot conceal from themselves or each other the depth of their old attachment.

The hope is that Anton will persuade Claire to rescue Gullen with her fortune. But Mays plays the role with moving sincerity. His Anton is spellbound by the woman he used to call “little witch” and “panther,” nicknames that will take on more significance after Claire lays down the condition on which she will deliver to Gullen and its inhabitants a life-changing amount of money.

Ricardo Chavira, Adrian LaTourelle, Jefferson Mays, John Lavelle and Matthew Henerson in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

That condition is revenge, or what she angrily refers to as “justice.” She will hand over a billion marks if Gullen punishes Anton for impregnating her and then lying about his responsibility, a betrayal that resulted in her being cast out of the town, forced to give up the baby and consigned to work in a brothel, where her fortunes eventually turned.

At first Burgomeister is aghast at such a horrific proposal and rebuffs her offer. But Claire knows the people of Gullen better than he does. Seduced by the prospect of extraordinary affluence, they start buying luxuries on credit. New shoes and outfits in sherbet-like pastels (the vibrant work of costume designer Charlotte Devaux), imported tobacco and butter and expensive cognac, none of which they can afford.

Anton’s own family goes on a manic spree. His store is modernized and restocked. Money hijacks morality, a sight all-too-familiar in an America in which oligarchs assume that they can buy elections and voters are prepared to ignore the most egregious anti-democratic behavior as long as the stock market goes up.

Theater critic Kenneth Tynan argued that the play is “really a satire on bourgeois democracy,” not just greed. And that the feverish plot builds to a serious question: “At what point does economic necessity turn democracy into a hoax?”

John Lavelle and Jefferson Mays in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Such an inquiry is devastatingly resonant today. But the fact that one can articulate the problem so concisely is perhaps why “The Visit” sags a bit in the middle. It’s possible to get ahead of the playwright, even for a work of such scrupulous intelligence and theatrical daring.

Some of the ways that Tresnjak ups the ante on that daring have diminishing returns. The club music that accompanies Claire’s bodybuilder retinue is funny the first time; less so on subsequent bursts. The gay-inflected camp loses steam, and I wondered about the production’s insistence on modernizing Gullen with modern technology and media, changes that become more conspicuous when consumerism takes over the town.

Surely a play can exist in its own fictional time. Choices, of course, have to be made, and timidity won’t get the job done. As Peter Brook, who directed the 1958 Broadway premiere starring Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt, wrote in “The Empty Space,” “If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound.” But trusting audiences to detect modern parallels on their own might be an even more powerful strategy these days.

Melinda Page Hamilton, Jefferson Mays and ensemble in “The Visit” at Pasadena Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

Fortunately, “The Visit” does speak clearly in Tresnjak’s production, beautifully arrayed on scenic designer Alexander Dodge’s inventive simulacrum of the town. The physical staging, featuring Aaron Rhyne’s projections, Matthew Richards’ lighting and Jonathan Burke’s sound design, is as imaginative as it is impressively extravagant.

Yet what stands out most about the production are the quiet moments between Mays’ Anton and Hamilton’s Claire. When they reconnect, it’s as if for a brief moment all the hopes of their youth are returned to them. Hamilton lets down Claire’s savage hauteur; Mays’ eyes glisten with all the regrets of lost love.

The conflict between these characters is greater than the morality tale engulfing them. It’s the one element of the play that escapes Dürrenmatt’s strict literary control. Of course the playwright has prepared the way, but the wayward emotions emanating from these inwardly glowing performances are refreshing in work that has the crisp, circumscribed elegance of a mathematical proof.