Review: Practice, Nazareth Hassan’s Takedown of Theatrical Mind Games

“On every show there is a victim,” Tony Award-winning set designer Boris Aronson once remarked on the secret to success in the theater. “Don’t be the victim.” Aronson, who was born to a Jewish family in the twilight of the Russian Empire and lived for a period in the Weimar Republic, knew all about the politics of victimization—and it should tell us something about the American theater that he used this language to describe it.

I thought about Aronson and the generations of individuals who have clawed out lives in the arts as I watched Nazareth Hassan’s Practice, now making its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons. A brutally revealing look at a Brooklyn experimental theater troupe, it elicits gasps and laughter in equal measure. If you happened to attend drama school, this clear-eyed takedown is very likely to trigger your PTSD.

It opens on auditions. We witness seven different actors perform the same monologue. Ro (Opa Adeyemo) is smooth with an inviting smile, easily selling us on this story about charming strangers in a dive bar. Less convincing is Rinni (Susannah Perkins, authentically awkward), a German carrying a lifetime of tension in her shoulders. Boy band handsome Tristan (Omar Shafiuzzaman) looks the part, but his inability to offer a straight answer to the director’s questions betrays a lack of confidence. He’ll say anything to book the job, which is to be expected in an industry in which there are 100 applicants for every paid position.

The voice giving them feedback from the house on what is unironically called the “God mic” belongs to Asa Leon (Ronald Peet), a much-praised auteur who has used his MacArthur “genius” grant to transform an old church on Nostrand Avenue into a theater. For eight weeks, the cast will eat, sleep, and rehearse in this sanctuary in preparation for a new play to be performed in London and Berlin. Like an avant-garde reality show, everything will be recorded because they will be playing one another. An indiscreet confession from Savannah (Amandla Jahava), a moment of reckless abandon from Keeyon (Hayward Leach)—all are fodder for the play as this cast transforms before our eyes into something more closely resembling a cult.

Peet unnervingly embodies the prophet-monarch at its center (it is surely not a coincidence that he shares a name with the great iconoclastic King of Judah). He/she/they wear a durag as crown and a denim skirt as a gender nonconforming clerical robe. An ill-fitting button-down shirt is a chasuble of hipster whimsy (Asa’s “genius” drag and all the spot-on costumes are by Brenda Abbandandolo and Karen Boyer).

With their well-curated eccentricity, Asa is the kind of artist a critic might describe as “groundbreaking.” But the soft mid-Atlantic cadence with which he speaks suggests a leader steeped in theatrical tradition, a practitioner of dark arts passed down from master to student. Peet’s soothing, almost motherly voice easily lulls the performers into a false sense of security. When she turns off the sun, they will do anything to get it back.

“I don’t quite trust Asa,” says Angelique (Maya Margarita, exuding unshakable fortitude). She’s the smart one, although one questions the intelligence of confiding this heresy in Mel (Karina Curet, alluringly mischievous), a Chilean child of privilege determined to prove that she’s not just a nepo-baby.

Charged with facilitating rehearsals and refilling Asa’s jar of jellybeans, Danny (Alex Wyse, projecting normie competence) is the ideal stage manager and willing executioner.

Asa’s designer husband, Walton (Mark Junek projecting insatiable thirst), is a constant presence in rehearsals. Their nonmonogamy (standard-issue for gay Millennials in creative fields) becomes yet another arena for psychological manipulation, with sex and money lurking in the shadows of this revolutionary theatrical venture. It’s Animal Farm at Theater Mitu.

Hassan, whose astonishing Bowl EP debuted at Vineyard Theatre earlier this year, presents an uncomfortably realistic vision of the way power operates in even the most high-minded settings, the casual cruelty artists are willing to perpetrate in the pursuit of a career—in order to not be the victim. We judge from the safety of the darkened house, but how many of us could honestly say we would stand up to it in our own workplaces? How many did during the cultural revolution of 2020?

Keenan Tyler Oliphant directs a tight and exceptionally well-acted production, the two hours of the first act (depicting the rehearsal period) charged with ever-mounting tension. In the second act, we get to see the play. Asa remains onstage for the entire intermission to oversee the load-in of Walton’s set, a mirrored cell for the insane without the benefit of padding (the scenery is by Afsoon Pajoufar). Masha Tsimring bathes the space in a sinister red glow as sound designer Tei Blow pipes in modern opera vocals that are simultaneously foreboding and ridiculous. “He said, she said, Joooooooohhhhn,” the vocalist drones as our Bond villain supervises the construction of his death ray.

The second act is undoubtedly the most fascinating play-within-a-play on this stage since Mr. Burns, with enough masks, stylized movement (Oliphant with Camden Gonzales), and realistic violence (shocking fight direction by Rocío Mendez) to make any jury of Euro-snobs—or perhaps a masochistic artistic director—swoon.

In lines like, “if you still want to see me / and my work / expect more of these,” Asa’s voice blurs with Hassan’s. The playwright is righteously calling out the theater’s relay race of outrageousness, the need to push just a bit farther so that an audience grown desensitized from consuming the fat of the most powerful empire on earth might feel something, if only for a moment. But Hassan is still running that race, far outpacing their peers—victimhood, for now, comfortably in the dust.