The Peterson Show
Echo Theater Company at Atwater Village Theatre
9-20-2026
You didn’t have to watch The Cosby Show in the ’80s and early ’90s to understand the depths of The Peterson Show.
But it sure helps.
A family sitcom whose center of gravity was a beloved and magnetic star. That was The Cosby Show. Years before that, my parents had us huddled around our old DuMont tube TV watching the Andersons and their beloved father who always seemed to know best. Years later, we did the same with the Huxtables. Much of America tuned in every week to see what problem this perfect television family would collectively solve for us.
But behind the curtain, The Cosby Show eventually had a very different story attached to it.
Playwright Janine Nabers’ The Peterson Show does an amazing job of capturing the spirit of a fictitious Cosby-like hit sitcom while slowly revealing the cracks beneath the perfect veneer. As her character Zoe says about her boss, “He Michelangeloed a whole Negro symphony.”
We meet this “symphony” years after their show has ended. Of the five Peterson siblings, only Blair has sustained a successful television career. Elliot put miles between himself and Hollywood and built a stable life elsewhere. Ronika, Dwight and Zoe are still struggling with what the show left behind.
Dwight is a standout character, played by Devere Rogers with buoyant enthusiasm and crackerjack hip-hop delivery. He does his best to hide his rampant drug use, though he makes little attempt to hide it from “Nique.” Ronika is a much more complex person, carrying plenty of baggage, the worst of which is yet to be revealed. Tamberla Perry gives her plenty of sass, but underneath it there is still enough heart left to open herself up to Dwight and Zoe.
Kelly McCreary’s Blair has just the right amount of older-sister understanding, yet she has committed an almost unforgivable sin in the eyes of the others: she succeeded.
They have all gathered after the death of their television mother, Valerie, played with wonderful complexity by Deanna Reed-Foster. Valerie appears in flashbacks, on screens and from beyond the grave as the layers of trauma inside this television family are slowly peeled away.
Speaking of flashbacks, the production team deserves applause for not only recreating the feel of a successful television series, with its eye-popping color, but for telling the story inside that world. Two large screens above the stage become the television the family watches and, at times, the television that once watched them.
Especially chilling is the posthumous DVD Valerie leaves behind for everyone to see, an attempt from beyond the grave to finally loosen the knot that has been strangling this TV family for years.
The Peterson Show never pretends to be a documentary about Bill Cosby, and Hayward Peterson is not Bill Cosby. But the echoes are impossible to miss: the beloved television patriarch, the family built around him, the public image of moral authority, and then the scandal that forces everyone around him to reconsider what all those happy years actually meant.
The scene in which Hayward Peterson addresses the young cast from the booth, demanding to be called “Sir,” was so chilling I felt like I should leave the room.
I want to see this play again because so much happens so fast. One minute they are in a dance rehearsal. The next they are dodging the press in one of the funniest scenes I have seen in black-box theater.
A lot of that credit goes to director Michelle Bossy. She takes Nabers’ rapid-fire, and at times heart-wrenching, dialogue and keeps the cast moving with snap and precision. There are no dead spots. We are on the edge of our seats one minute and laughing our heads off the next. And then crying our eyes out for their loss.
The Peterson Show exceeded my expectations, but more importantly, it followed me home. It asks a question we have been wrestling with for a long time:
What do we do with the good work of someone whose later actions become impossible to ignore?
Bill Cosby is hardly the only person whose entire public identity has been reconsidered after scandal. O.J. Simpson, Lance Armstrong, Joe Paterno, Pete Rose, Martha Stewart, Jimmy Swaggart and others have all had remarkable accomplishments pushed into the shadow of what came later.
But are all of those cases really the same?
A person’s worst act may change how we judge that person. It may change how we experience the work. Sometimes the wrongdoing may even be inseparable from the accomplishment itself.
But it does not make the accomplishment disappear. That is the uncomfortable territory The Peterson Show walks into.
And it does not give us an easy way out.
The Peterson Show runs Friday, Saturday and Mondays at 8 pm and Sundays at 4 pm with one Thursday performance at 8pm on October 1. The play runs through October 26.
For tickets and information: https://www.echotheatercompany.com/peterson-show
Reviewer: Chris Cassone is a recording engineer, writer, photographer, and lifelong guitarist who documents the visual culture of effects pedals in his Art of The Stomp Box. Coming: “Me & Ace – A 54-Year Rock ‘n’ Roll Friendship” about the late Ace Frehley, whom he knew pre-KISS and developed a strong relationship with, especially during their mutual sobriety.