The real world is never as stable as we think—especially when a story dares to break it right before our eyes. From March 6-9, Harvard students sold out the original play “be cozy,” which distilled a whole world into a living room—a living room where the lines between performance and reality blurred with unsettling ease. Staged at the Loeb Experimental Theater, this play captivated me with its psychological depth and immersive staging, drawing me in not merely as a spectator but as a silent participant in the characters’ lives unraveling before me.
“be cozy,” an original play written and directed by Zach Halberstam ’25, follows rising horror film actress Emily (Maibritt Henkel ’25), who grows anxious from the pressure of her current role to the point of insomnia and increasingly alarming outbursts. Her developing mania strains her relationship with her compulsively hygienic boyfriend Robert (Isaac Newman ’25), who is struggling to find employment after dropping out of medical school. Witnessing the two’s deteriorating relationship is Emily’s younger brother Andrew (Benjamin Walter ’26), who lives indefinitely with the couple and spends all of his time studying flashcards in preparation for a game show he will soon be on.
On the periphery is Steve (Matine Khalighi ’25), Emily’s co-star and the play’s narrator. He embodies both the antagonist in her film and an omnipotent force in the show, weaving through the characters’ lives. At times, he serves as the narrator, while at others, he directly engages in the scenes, manipulating and influencing the action.
Steve’s character is “Something in between [Emily’s] co-star and the actual monster. Her co-star, the monster in the movie, [is] the monster in real life. He’s meant to feel in control,” Halberstam said. “I intended [Steve] to be in control of the narrative, and when [Emily] feels trapped, she feels trapped in a lot of ways. I wanted there to be a person who is doing a lot of the trapping.”
I observed the evidence of Halberstam’s intentions for Steve in the play, yet I found that my interpretation of the character differed. In tense scenes, Steve was always visibly roaming a balcony behind the living room in the dark, as though his presence in Emily’s was constantly underlying. While an inventive, powerful detail to include, I found that the subtlety to having Steve in the background made him a symbol for Emily’s struggle with reality rather than an active controlling agent. My attention gravitated more to the core of other characters’ stories.
Similar to Halberstam’s unique implementation of Steve’s character, the production team also leveraged stage innovations. Lighting designer Raul Bodrogean ’25 meticulously inserted flashes of red and blue into scenes with predominantly natural lighting, emphasizing cracks in the characters’ realities.
Set designer Emily Xing ’27 succeeded in adding to this construction of a world on the verge of collapse. The modest furniture in the living room was deliberately fashioned to make the audience uncomfortable, with the couch, the dining table, and an aged rug set unnaturally far apart. The distance between the furniture contributed to each actor’s performance, as they could be in the same room but feel like they were each in their own world.
My favorite aspect of the set was its fully functioning sink and how it developed Robert’s character. Right at the front of the stage, the sink was immediately the center of the audience’s attention because of Robert’s compulsion to wash his hands with the same routine: wetting them, covering them in soap, rubbing each finger clean, drying them with a towel, and smoothing the towel over on the counter. Halberstam credited this practical detail to Robert’s actor, Newman, who thought the habit fit his character.
Halberstam’s writing granted the audience a strange comfort even in what seemed like the most impossible circumstances. Every aspect of the show cultivated intimacy, from its minimal set where the audience sat at eye-level to each scene, to the human dialogue heard not through microphones but through the perfectly projected voices of the actors. While there was an obvious wall of separation between the audience and the actors, we were still positioned as close spectators to each character’s most vulnerable moments, inches away from their tension-filled dinners, able to see their stressed expressions when they hid their faces from the other figures.
At certain moments, I had the urge to stand up from my seat and walk up to the production’s characters to closely examine them. I felt like I was a ghost in Emily, Andrew, and Robert’s home. These characters did not seem to be performing for us but rather living through seemingly solitary, real moments in time, and because of this, are comfortable enough to express their fears in the same way we all do when we roam our living rooms alone. This vulnerability left spectators free to invade their lives, which we did unhesitatingly.
Halberstam subverted my previous impression of monologues by masterfully depicting Emily’s anxieties and breakdowns in a believable format. Towards the beginning of the play, she rehearses her scenes out loud, talking herself through the lines that she forgot, before she eventually began to spiral, at one point screaming her fears of the future. That scene was particularly powerful and lingering, thanks to Henkel’s moving performance and Halberstam’s compelling writing. Her words are less so a confession to the audience but a desperate attempt to regain control over her unraveling thoughts, exposing her internal chaos without filter.
Speaking with Newman about Robert’s character after viewing “be cozy” revealed the power of intimacy between the audience and characters. Newman explained his understanding of the collapse of Emily and Robert’s relationship from the perspective of Robert—when Robert left. “Emily stayed in the same place, and time kept going. She got stuck in this loop. She’s in this cycle that she imposed on herself. Everything’s already happened before. Everything’s gonna happen again.”
Every night Emily spends awake, her sleep deprivation triggers a spiral where she loses control of her reality. “That’s where she is, and she needs to figure out how to get out of that cycle. And Robert has gotten too far away, and she’s staying there,” Newman said.
However, in contrast to Newman’s perspective, the audience’s holistic viewing of Emily and Robert’s experiences develop a different conception of Emily’s struggles that stretched beyond the cycle Robert identified. In this dissonance, spectators became the bridge between these disconnected individuals, underscoring the power of intimacy between the audience and the characters in “be cozy” and reaching realizations about the characters that often surpassed what they thought of one another.
I left the Loeb Ex with both judgment and pity for each of Halberstam’s characters, a reaction that at first troubled me. All of us have sleepless, anxiety-riddled nights like Emily, a fear of imperfection like Robert, and moments of overbearing dependence like Andrew. I felt it unreasonable to resent any character for these faults, as these were attributes we could assign to ourselves at different points in our lives. But to harbor such strong feelings towards fiction is proof of compelling writing. In a way, my own reality was blurred; I felt so submerged in the living room set that I momentarily forgot I was merely an observer, reacting to their struggles as if they were my own.
Halberstam masterfully portrayed mental illness without making a spectacle of it. His decision to not label any of his characters with a diagnosis allowed the audience to relate to Halberstam’s scenes willingly. We believed for a moment that what we saw was real, and through this, our line between perception and reality was blurred. “be cozy” ultimately leaves us wondering; are the boundaries of sanity and illusion so clear-cut?
Courtney Hines’28 (courtneyhines@college.harvard.edu) is questioning her current furniture positionings with the Independent.