First, Do No Harm (KXT/NIDA) ★★★½

Written by Grace Malouf. NIDA in association with Bakehouse Theatre and Talia M-K presents. KXT on Broadway. 24 Jun – 4 Jul, 2026.

I get a real thrill out of a play that brings me a new idea or a new conundrum to mull over, and, to quote the great Danny Zuko, “I’ve got chills, they’re multiplying”. First, Do No Harm has strong performances and a fantastic premise to work from.

Surgeon Melissa (Kate Bookallil) and her former-Olympic swimmer partner Robbo (Richard Hilliar) have a healthy, athletic, smart 19 year old son, Alexei (Josh Merten). Training to be an Olympic hopeful himself, Alexei hits a wall in training. When they send him to a sports psychologist, who refers him to another psychiatrist, Alexei starts to open up about the unease he’s always felt about his body. When he approaches his parents with a request for unexpected elective surgery, the family is thrown into a dilemma that tangles with medical ethics and body autonomy. What can a parent do when their adult child wants something they find abhorrent?

For a small independent show with a short run, the performances are truly excellent. Of all the characters, the most complex and difficult is that of Alexei, in which Josh Merten is a standout. Merten gives Alexei an authentic sense of self that ripples through the events of the play. It’s a beautifully rich performance marked by its conviction.

Kate Bookallil and Richard Hilliar are polar opposites as Alexei’s parents. Hilliar’s Robbo is a big, gregarious, emotional man with a firm foundation in his own beliefs. Bookallil’s Melissa is the serious, driven parent with a high powered career that often keeps her apparently aloof from family matters. They demonstrate their love for Alexei in different, sometimes contradictory ways. They’re great characters, giving the narrative a yin and a yang from which to bounce around the plot’s moral and ethical questions.

I can only imagine how much deeper and richer these roles could be with a longer process to work on them. It’s great stuff.

Playwright Grace Malouf, a screenwriter and MFA graduate from NIDA, has constructed a juicy scenario for the characters to respond to (I’m trying REALLY hard not to name it so as not to give out spoilers), and is happy to play with your expectations.

For the first third of First, Do No Harm I had a sinking feeling. Thinking I knew where the story was going I was getting fidgety expecting another well-meaning but undramatic polemic that did little more than preach to the already liberal choir in the audience. And Malouf is deliberately pushing us in that direction. It’s a heavy-handed misdirect and one I suspect would be better served as subtext for the audience to intuit than to be so clearly signposted, but…

Once the real matter is revealed, I was all in.

This is the kind of moral/intellectual/ethical grey area many modern plays are lacking. First, Do No Harm had suddenly earned my interest.

The story is unavoidably exposition heavy – this deals with a genuine medical issues and the knotty nuance of medical ethics – and Malouf succeeds in communicating the details without losing the emotional core. There are side-stories that weave in and out of Alexei’s core narrative that, to be honest, didn’t quite land for me and I could happily see excised. Melissa’s career prospects didn’t add the level of intrigue that was intended and I was far more invested in the family drama. There are some minor pacing issues, and the climactic event suffers from being awkward and un-theatrical – hard to execute convincingly in a stage environment – and could do with a reframing.

But it’s undeniable that Malouf has constructed an impressive debut play – and thank the theatre gods above for a new, fresh take on a topic that has wider resonance, supported by engaging performances all round. Great situation, great characters – this is a fantastic way to burst out the gates and I personally look forward to more from everyone involved.