Katrina Lenk, Jane Alexander and Denée Benton portray 9/11 widows in this half hour play by Matthew Lopez, a radical departure in running time from his Broadway debut play The Inheritance. The women meet every year for breakfast at a coffee shop near the World Trade Center site, presided over by a sympathetic waitress (Priscilla Lopez, who also reads the stage directions — and is Matthew’s aunt.)

If there are no great surprises, “The Sentinels,” the second  weekly presentation  in MCC Theater’s online LiveLabs series of original plays,  is worth your time — well-acted, touching, appealing in part because of its very modesty  — and it demonstrated a few things to me. A play can be well-directed, in this case by Rebecca Taichman (Tony-winner for Indecent) even when presented neck-up via Zoom.  Short works for drama as much as it did for comedy  in MCC’s offering last week, Frankie and Will.) And, apparently,  I don’t necessarily need theater these days either to cheer me up nor to mirror precisely the locked down life we are forced to be living at the moment.

The video, which debuted May 20th, is available until Saturday, May 23, 2020.