‘All Nighter’ Review: No Sleep but Plenty of Gripes

The all-nighter is a time-honored tradition of higher education (and also — let’s be honest, as I write this review in the late evening hours — of journalism). The best kind of all-nighter isn’t the solo cram session but a social event, a time of bonding through exhaustion and desperation, with the aid of caffeine and junk food.

So if you take a group of five college seniors, some stimulants and a few secrets, then throw them together into a pressure cooker in the form of a nightlong work session, there should be plenty of extracurricular drama to go around. But by the time the sun comes up in “All Nighter,” which opened Sunday at the MCC Theater, this underwhelming play feels as if it has left a lot of unfinished work on the table.

The play, written by Natalie Margolin, takes place in a college in rural Pennsylvania in 2014. It’s finals week at the Johnson Ballroom, a 24-hour student lounge, and this loyal cohort of study-buddies-slash-roomies includes the anxious and often flustered Liz (Havana Rose Liu); the organized and put-together Darcie (Kristine Froseth), who’s aiming for law school; the well-off Tessa (Alyah Chanelle Scott), who has a love for athleisure clothes; and the sentimental Jacqueline (Kathryn Gallagher), who is latching onto the last moments of college before departing for “the real world.” And then fashionably — or, depending on who asks, unfashionably — late to the party is the wild and eccentric Wilma (Julia Lester, the priceless Little Red Riding Hood in the 2022 “Into the Woods” revival on Broadway), dressed in floral cowboy boots, pink and black knee-highs and pink marble leggings, and fully accessorized.

The students get down to some work but not without a few interpersonal revelations — lingering tiffs, secrets and suspicions from the partying they had done the night before. And then there are the mysterious disappearances in their house, like Liz’s missing Adderall pills and Tessa’s lost credit card.

Margolin’s script playfully replicates the mannerisms and tropes of college friendships, especially among women, like the chorus of affirmations girlfriends will automatically offer another in need, or the defensive positions they deploy when someone’s enemy walks into the room.

But with one or two identifying characteristics each, these young women lack dimension for them to read as much more than generic college-girl types. And because “All Nighter” fails as it tries to establish a sense of the bonds that have developed over their four years together, it then isn’t able to fully show the tenuousness of these friendships.