Directors have always had a reputation for their god complex, but Asa Leon — the manipulative theater-maker at the center of Nazareth Hassan’s dark satire Practice — takes matters to a whole other level. As played by the remarkable Ronald Peet with commanding charisma that morphs into steely-eyed malevolence, Asa embodies a certain modern type in the arts world: a kilt-wearing nonbinary narcissist who not so casually mentions their MacArthur genius grant and who creates a seriously imbalanced power dynamic while developing their new avant garde theater piece in a Brooklyn theater space that used to be a church. There, Asa has assembled a seven-member cast, a sycophantic dramaturg (Alex Wyse), and a deep-pocketed set-designer husband (Mark Junek) who quietly funds the new project and not so quietly hooks up with one of the actors.
Asa’s new work is to be built over an intensive eight-week period where the entire company will live and work together, sharing personal stories that Asa will assemble into a piece that recalls the process used to create A Chorus Line and The Laramie Project. But Asa’s approach is much more intrusive as they seek to lure the cast into sharing personal stories — secrets, really — and go to increasingly extreme lengths to gain the actors’ cooperation if not their trust. They don’t model themselves on dictatorial directors like Alfred Hitchcock so much as the psychologist Stanley Milgram, who documented the human inclination to obedience. Private conversations are played or read back to the group, a whiteboard chart allows people to ding others for a perceived lack of commitment to the process, and individuals are pitted against each other as they all seek the attention and approval of the genius who’s identified something worthwhile in them to hire them in the first place.
Hassan, who made a mark earlier this year with the genre-defying queer romance Bowl EP, has emerged as one of the most inventive and challenging playwrights now working. Practice, which takes a similarly creative approach to dramatic structure, begins with a re-creation of the audition and rehearsal period for Asa’s new piece that runs an uninterrupted two hours — followed by a briefer 40-minute second act that shows that work as it debuts in Berlin and London. The title thus suggests the nature of a rehearsal period as well as that buzzword describing a modern creator’s methodology, their artistic “practice.”
Hassan zeroes in on Asa’s practice, and how the modern theater world tends to foster situations where the director (or the producer, or some combination of the two) can hold an authority where any questioning, let alone any pushback, can be flatly rejected out of hand. The way that this plays out in Practice is fascinating, infuriating, and increasingly humorous in a pitch-black way — assuming that you’re not triggered by watching leaders who manipulate, gaslight, and belittle their underlings to get their way. The second act — which places the cast in a mirrored box (designed by Afsoon Pajoufar) and asymetrical color-matched jumpsuits that seem to have come from some futuristic asylum (by Brenda Abbandandolo and Karen Boyer) — brilliantly satirizes cutting-edge theater while upending our ideas about everything that has already transpired. (Masha Tsimring’s glaring lighting and Tel Blow’s discomfiting sound design contribute to the unsettling effect.)
The cast, under the remarkable direction of Keenan Tyler Oliphant, is transfixingly authentic, veering from adoring to needy to cowed at a moment’s notice. While they share an eagerness to please and a notable lack of experience that helps explain their willingness to endure ever-greater indignities for the sake of “art,” they’re remarkably different in background. There’s the easy-going Ro (Opa Adeyomo), who was molested as a boy; the Chilean nepo baby Mel (Karina Curet), whose family did some shady things to get ahead; the earnest and focused German Rinni (Susannah Perkins), who struggled to overcome her somewhat robotic vocal technique; the flamboyant flirt Keeyon (Hayward Leach); the excitable, but eager-to-please Tristan (Omar Shafiuzzaman); the over-achieving Savannah (Amandla Jahava); and the blunt-talking Yale dropout Angelique (Maya Margarita).
Practice is by no means perfect. That extended first act is a very long sit, and not all of the characters are fleshed out sufficiently for us to identify with them as individuals (the confusion is often compounded since their backstories are assigned to other actors to perform in the play-within-a-play). And while I do not wish to lengthen a play that already runs over three hours, I wish that Act 2 had explored how the cast comes to terms with the work they helped inspire and create, and were now performing in public. We see brief glimpses of some of the performers in the show’s final moments, stretching or hydrating backstage as they prepare for a performance, but there’s no real grappling with how they view the project that Asa has cheekily christened Self-Awareness Exercise 001. Perhaps that’s the point — to expose the complacency that can crop up when an artist, or anyone in authority, obliterates the line between rigor and exploitation. ★★★★☆
PRACTICE
Playwrights Horizons, Off Broadway
Running time: 3 hours, 10 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through December 14 for $64 to $104
Culture Sauce 