“Samaritans” is the fifth new play reading in Ground UP’s 2026 winter festival.
Is there such a thing as an actual good deed? Or even a good person? These and more questions about tests of character are asked in Samaritans, the new three-character play by Jeff Talbott getting a staged reading March 2. It’s the last of five plays in Ground UP Productions’ 2026 New Works Winter Reading Festival. The author directs the free Manhattan presentation, featuring Corey Allen, Ground UP artistic director Kate Middleton and Jessica Money.
“The play is about two best friends, Ash [Allen] and Greer [Middleton],” Talbott told me. “They met in college and have seen each other through every major life event — including divorces for both of them, family ups and downs, all of it. They know each other down to their bones, or think they do, and the play challenges that perceived knowledge in a life-changing way, and it is all because of the intersection of their friendship with a woman named Nadia.”
What’s the event that sets the play off?
Corey Allen plays Ash in “Samaritans.”
“Nadia is a waitress at the diner Ash and Greer frequent every Sunday after church,” Talbott said. “As the play begins, Ash makes an impulsive decision to do what he thinks is a good deed for Nadia and the play takes off from there.”
This is second play by Jeff Talbott to appear in the annual Ground UP series, after Joseph Cook, which also featured Middleton, in 2024. Corey Allen appeared in the 2025 Ground UP reading of Alex Webb’s Focus. Jessica Money appeared in the January world premiere of Talbott and Will Van Dyke’s musical Ten Brave Seconds. Kodi Lynn Milburn is the stage manager. The reading series producers include Jordan Ahnquist and Josh Evans.
A reservation is required for the nearly sold out presentation at 7 PM at ART NY, 520 Eighth Avenue, Third Floor, in Manhattan. Reserve here. Learn more about the history and mission of Ground UP here.
Talbott answered a handful of questions about his new play before rehearsals began.
Ground UP Productions artistic director Kate Middleton plays Greer.
The play’s title has a vaguely Biblical vibe. How does the New Testament parable of The Good Samaritan — a foundational “good deed” tale — connect to your play, if at all?
Jeff Talbott: The title certainly is meant to send a hint that we are talking about people of faith, and how their faith collides with their lives and actions. As with every play, there is plot and there is story — the plot of Samaritans circles around Ash’s good deed, but the story is actually about how little we possibly know even the people we think we know the most. I think that’s a question I keep returning to in my writing — the unknowability of literally everybody. It’s also important to note that the title is plural — it’s about three possible Samaritans, not just one.
This a story about faith — people of faith?
Jeff Talbott: I am not an expert on faith, and so am really not qualified to interrogate it with a laser-like eye. I think/hope that what I am doing here is treating people who are deeply faithful with a lot of respect and curiosity. I definitely am not interested in mocking their beliefs; I’m trying to walk in step with them as they find things out about themselves and the world around them even as a lot of their conversations bend toward an examination of their “goodness.”
In working through drafts of this play, did its form or nature change? What prompted those changes?
Jeff Talbott: The draft of Samaritans that is being presented at Ground UP is brand new and a major reworking of the form of the play. In early drafts, it had a structure that was very novelistic and narrated and ultimately unsatisfying to me. I have removed that framework to hopefully put the audience in the middle of an experience that is happening in real time right in front of them. There’s a mystery at the heart of this play about subjectivity vs. objectivity in terms of what actually happened in any given circumstance, and I hope that’s an open door for audience members to have very differing opinions on what happened by the end of the play.
Playwright Jeff Talbott
What’s a major takeaway for you when looking at the play?
Jeff Talbott: What I think is always less important than what an audience takes away, since I sincerely believe my job is to ask questions and leave it to an audience member to choose their own adventure as they grapple with the play after. But as far as this writer is concerned, Samaritans is about how friendship works — and how it doesn’t — and if it is possible to ever truly know even the people you love the most. And maybe having a belief that you know somebody that well leaves you even more vulnerable to finding out things about them that shake your surety about everybody.
The key art for this reading shows a diner. Is a diner setting central to the play?
Jeff Talbott: I loved the idea of a booth in a diner because it’s both public and private — two people can be having the most monumental conversation of their lives right next to a random person just trying to order an omelet.
What was the first thing you remember writing for this play?
Jeff Talbott: Like all writers, I keep a file folder of ideas, and a couple of years ago was casting about for something to write and found a sentence in that file folder that was so simple: “a good person does a good deed that goes horribly wrong.” It also had a second sentence that is the dramatic climax of the play, but it’d be a sin to spoil that.
If this play were in rep with another play of yours, which would you pick?
Jeff Talbott: I think so much of my work is about trying to know the people we love, so I could pick any of them, but there is definitely shared DNA here with Joseph Cook, which Ground UP featured in their reading series a couple of years ago. That play is about a brother and sister with rougher edges than the friends in Samaritans, but only on the surface. Because people are all just muddling through the best they can, and in both of these plays, the muddle is what I’m invested in.
Jessica Money appears as Nadia in the reading.
Beyond the formidable Corey Allen and Kate Middleton, Jessica Money is in this reading. She just appeared in the world premiere of your musical Ten Brave Seconds for Pioneer Theatre Company in Salt Lake City. What about her is right for Samaritans?
Jeff Talbott: I know — so many amazing actors! Corey and Kate are, as you say, formidable — the best of the best. Jessica is new to the Jeff Talbott Repertory Company, but from her audition for Ten Brave Seconds on to every single day with her, she made it very clear she was here to stay. She is incapable of dishonesty as an actor, which is a rare trait. She also has such a deep skillset as a craftsperson, and would hate me saying this, but an unshakeable confidence in her ability to share a full-blooded human being with an audience. I cannot take my eyes off her on stage — her whole heart is beating in her eyes and she is living through each moment as it hits her. Also, good lord can she sing. But now I just want her in everything: play, musical, whatever.
*
Jeff Talbott’s play The Submission was the inaugural recipient of the Laurents/Hatcher Award and was produced off-Broadway by MCC Theater; it went on to receive the Outer Critics Circle John Gassner Award for New American Play. Other produced works: The Messenger, The Gravedigger’s Lullaby, i, Civics and Humanities for Non-Majors and A Public Education. Other plays: Joseph Cook; Not-For-Profit; Three Rules for the Dragon, How to Build a City, Elliot and All the Stars in the Midnight Sky. He writes musicals with composer Will Van Dyke, the latest of which, fuzzy, received its world premiere in 2025 at Barrington Stage Company and went on to win Outstanding New Work from the Berkshire Theatre Critics Association. Their musical Ten Brave Seconds premiered in February 2026 at Pioneer Theatre Company. Other musicals from the team: Seven Broken Hearts, The Circle and the Wheel, Wintersong and Imagine Harry. They have released multiple EPs and singles and together were finalists for the 2019 Fred Ebb Award and the 2021 and 2026 Kleban Award. He graduated with honors from the Yale School of Drama.
