Last Call: A Play with Cocktails  

Last Call: A Play with Cocktails  

by Hansol Jung  

Directed by Hansol Jung & Dustin Wills  

Various New York City Apartments  

New York, NY  

September 22, 2025 

Reviewed by Daria Kerschenbaum 

One of the allures of immersive theatre is the promise of intimacy. And intimacy requires trust. Last Call: A Play with Cocktails, a new work by Hansol Jung and The Pack, not only understands this facet of the genre, but exploits it. Performed in a rotating variety of homes for roughly thirty attendees, and produced by the site-specific company En Garde Arts, the play promises solace to those “craving connection.” But instead of creating closeness or community, the piece lies to the audience at close-range until they become complicit in a murder. Last Call uses the unique features of immersive performance to underscore how vulnerable audiences are to misinformation, both at a national level and an interpersonal scale. 

The seduction begins as soon as guests arrive at that evening’s location—in my case, a Boerum Hill brownstone—and deliver a password into walkie-talkie before entering a private house party. The gathering has an air of exclusivity; audience members mingle over drinks, glimpsing the ephemera (fridge magnets, framed posters, bookshelf collections) that suggest the host’s private life. This sense of gaining access to a unique affair is only heightened by the fictional circumstances of the gathering. A welcome letter sets the scene: “Congratulations on leaving the comfort and safety of your homes during this crisis... Leave your street disguises, bulletproof vests, night goggles, and other PPE [at the door].” Through the language that is reminiscent of recent events, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the South Korean martial law crisis, the letter implies that an authoritarian government looms over the function. Participants are subtly asked to trust one another in the face of extraordinary circumstances.   

The party is interrupted when someone disguised as a mailbox steps through the door. This is our bartender for the night. Identified as the Tender in the program, this character is played by a rotating cast of The Pack regulars, including Nicole Villamil. She apologizes for her tardiness as she sets up her bar cart for the night. It appears that we, the audience, have hired her despite the curfew. A fascinating power dynamic emerges as the Tender mixes a Vieux Carré: we have the security and capital to hire entertainment amid a catastrophe, and the Tender is precarious enough to risk her safety. She sends a tip jar around, causing guests to squirm and cough up a few singles. The gesture highlights the dynamic of the wealthy patron and starving artist, uncomfortably amplified by the production’s intimacy. It also places the audience on the back foot as they attempt to prove their liberalism or disown their privilege, many of them made vulnerable by their eagerness to please.    

Though it might appear that the audience is in control, the Tender holds all the cards. Participants are selected to guess if a given piece of liquor trivia is true or false. A correct answer results in a coveted cocktail (though the Tender is happy to hand out drinks to patrons who offer her a compliment, too). The Tender also determines who amongst the audience gets attention, doling out banter and asides throughout the performance. In this way, the very structure Last Call sets up an uneven power relationship between actor and audience, in which audience members seek something from the performer and must follow a set of rules to win her over.  

When the Tender steps outside to answer a call, a new character saunters to the center of the living room. This is the ghost of the Tender’s husband, referred to only as the Other Tender, played by Esco Jouléy. He brags about his glory days behind the bar. He had a gift for knowing exactly what a patron needed—a Rum Negroni, a hug, or even a tryst in the supply closet. Holding the keys to someone else’s desire is his superpower, as is his disarming honesty. He asserts his reliability by telling the audience he has nothing to hide, even if it means admitting to past infidelity. So, when he claims that the Tender murdered him in cold blood, the audience is forced to pause. “She’s an actress. She believes her lies until they become true!” he warns. Last Call magnifies the real-life tension between patron and performer, customer and service worker, even further; what feels like intimate emotional caretaking easily morphs into manipulation. We need them, and it feels dangerous.       

When the Tender returns to the apartment, she stirs an Aviation and recounts her version of the marriage. She refused to acknowledge her husband’s affairs for months until they became unavoidable. After a blow-up fight and weeks of silence, the Other Tender was caught in a crossfire on the way to a bartending gig. Whose version of events do we believe? Or, rather, which story do we prefer? The play concludes in a “shot off” in which guests vote for one of the mixologists by drinking a shot they prepared. At the show I attended, an overwhelming majority of guests sided with the liar, including myself. Yet in retrospect, the truth was plain to see, practically waved in front of our faces from the first moments of the play. One of the Tender’s first trivia questions involves a line from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.” She personally couldn’t disagree more: when life is short, expensive, and filled with terror, the Tender would much rather take the love, money, and fame. Truth, the play suggests, is already null and void under an authoritarian regime. This search for pleasure and avoidance of pain motivates the Tender to ignore her husband’s cheating, and, to a certain degree, drives this audience to go to a brownstone in Boerum Hill and indulge in the fantasy of community. 

It is one thing to watch a play about manipulation, and another thing entirely to experience that manipulation firsthand. The latter forces spectators to confront their fallibility, their desire for comforting fabrications, with far more immediacy than the former. That confrontation takes on particular significance for New York audiences; many liberal-leaning participants would like to believe they are immune to the narratives peddled by the current administration. Last Call compels them to reexamine who and what they trust.