Review: Bowl EP, Nazareth Hassan’s Queer Rap Concert at the Edge of the Galaxy

Have you ever wanted to stop time and linger in a moment? In Bowl EP, writer-director Nazareth Hassan invites us to vicariously marinate in suspended bliss, free of strife or striving. It’s a rare sensation for busy New Yorkers chasing the next calendar item. This extraordinarily imaginative, quietly beautiful, and suddenly devastating new play is now performing off-Broadway at Vineyard Theatre in a co-production with National Black Theatre, and in association with the New Group.

The three companies have pooled their resources to build a literal pool in the center of Vineyard’s 15^th Street theater, with the audience surrounding the hyper-realistic playing space, which really does look like a drained pool cordoned by chain-link fencing (scenic designers Adam Rigg and Anton Volovsek deliver detailed specificity without too many bells and whistles).

For amateur rappers and newfound lovers Kelly K Klarkson (Essence Lotus) and Quentavius da Quitter (Oghenero Gbaje) it is a makeshift skate park, a place to experiment with rhymes, drugs, and their bodies. Ostensibly not much happens for the first half as we witness them roll around the curves of the empty pool on their skateboards, dreaming up names for their rap duo and plotting their debut album.

Flirtatious interludes lead to exuberant choruses of sexually charged physical contact (highly realistic fight and intimacy choreography by Teniece Divya Johnson). No one disturbs their hermetically sealed playground. It’s like a scene out of Sartre, except neither of them wants to escape, having discovered a little bit of eternity in each other.

Sporting wide, curious eyes and a big dopey smile that could melt a polar icecap, Gbaje easily conveys Quentavius’s total infatuation, offering a bag sandwich in supplication as Kelly lounges on the diving board like a goddess on her celestial throne. Kelly accepts the sandwich and the power, exercising it in ways both tender and sadistic.

But Lotus never allows the latter to overtake the former in a sensitive performance that suggests a whole backstory in which she wields no power at all. Lotus’s penetrating gaze and disarmingly thick New York accent add spice and specificity. This is a love story I could watch play out for hours, even as little of consequence appears to transpire.

Still, we came here to see a play. Hassan knows this and gives it to us good and hard in the back half. An intense acid trip and an ambitious deepthroating leads Quentavius to vomit up his demon, an anime pixie named Lemon Pepper Wings (Felicia Curry). A hype man from hell, her arrival transforms the pool into an arena where Kelly and Quentavius give the performance of their lives (Lotus and Gbaje both possess razor-sharp diction and irresistible charisma). The music, by Free Fool, is the kind that makes you want to get up and dance—or at least stomp on the treadmill with Kelly, the world’s coolest Peloton instructor. It’s a moment of pure ecstasy, and we know it cannot last.

As Lemon Pepper Wings, Curry maniacally embodies one of the most terrifying villains I’ve encountered on a New York stage. She is hunger, but also shame—binge and purge. She is the dark goddess of ambition, fueling dreams and doling out disappointment in a restless, insatiable land. An interdimensional Cassandra, she delivers an operatic, sweaty monologue projecting our lovers’ lives deep into the future, through adult responsibilities and regrets, inevitably ending in death.

Curry is masterful and magnetic, seizing our attention and never relinquishing it as we, ravenous consumers of narrative, devour every word. As when we are about to burst, she leaves us with the bitter aftertaste of love abandoned, never to be found again. That’s when she steps forward to take her extravagant bow, as if to say, Are you not entertained?

Hassan meets the unconstrained imagination of their script with a production that is low-key spectacular. Costume designer DeShon Elem adorns our two rappers in denim fantasies, envisioning a world that is both gender nonconforming and highly durable. Kate McGee’s lighting creates a Madison Square Garden rap concert in space, cleverly coordinating with Ryan Gamblin’s insidious sound design to take us all on a surprise acid trip (I did not consent, but I won’t say no). Zavier Augustus Lee Taylor projects scene titles, presented as “track numbers,” onto the pool floor, seemingly bringing order to this anarchic drama; but even those become suspect as dopamine-induced euphoria curdles into paranoia.

I’m still coming down from Bowl EP, a play whose aftereffects I suspect will linger in my brain for years. It is living proof that even the smallest stages can contain infinite worlds.