'All Nighter' Is an Adderall-Fueled College Pressure Cooker
BY
Matt Wille | Feb 28, 2025
It's a scene familiar to many of us — the manic fury of pulling an all-nighter at your college library, fraught with the pressures of coursework and the heightened emotions that come with living alongside your best friends. Add some Adderall to the mix and — well, let's just say not all of college is joyful.
This is the setting writer Natalie Margolin chose for her latest work, All Nighter, which opens off-Broadway at The Newman Mills Theater at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space on March 9. Set during finals week at a small liberal arts college, the show follows five seniors as they stay up all night furiously writing notes and digging into friend group drama.
The show features an all-star, all-female cast: Kristine Frøseth (The Buccaneers), Kathryn Gallagher (Jagged Little Pill), Julia Lester (Into The Woods), Havana Rose Liu (Bottoms) and Alyah Chanelle Scott (The Sex Lives of College Girls) — a stellar mix of stage and screen queens able to carry the single-setting story with humor and emotional grace.
"Working with this cast has been beyond my wildest dreams," Margolin tells PAPER. "They've all come in with such profound empathy and care. To work in a room where all the actors care about the characters as much as I do — it's been so generative and generous and supportive and really, deeply meaningful."
Margolin began working on the play in 2019 as an investigation of complex group friendship dynamics. "I'm really interested in female friendship," she continues. "It's that moment in your life when your identity is more intertwined with a group than with just the individual... it's this sort of pressure cooker."
Tickets for All Nighter, which is directed by Jaki Bradley, are available here and at the theater box office; the show began previews February 25 and runs through May 18.
Photography: Evan Zimmerman
