Nazareth Hassan’s Practice Horrified Me, Exactly As Intended
What does horror look like onstage? There are spooky ghost stories like The Woman in Black, bloodbaths like Carrie: The Musical, and heroically lo-fi scarefests like North Bergen High School’s 2019 adaptation of Alien, created on a budget of $3,500 and pretty high on my list of Shows I Wish I Had Seen. Most experiments with the genre retain an interest in its supernatural or gory tropes, along with the challenge of manifesting various gross or ghoulish effects in live performance.
Not so with Practice. Nazareth Hassan’s play has no hauntings or jump scares; it never shows us anything from beyond our mortal side of the veil, but there can be no doubt about its species. Its characters are stuck in a house with a monster, possibly more than one, and for almost three hours we watch them, like flies mummified in spider silk, as they’re gradually and inevitably consumed. Worse, these bugs have enthusiastically offered themselves up to the web, have even fought for a place in it. It’s pretty stomach-curdling. It’s also a form of love letter, in the sense of James Baldwin’s reframing of patriotism in Notes of a Native Son: “I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
The object of that love, in Practice, is theater. “This form that has saved my life,” Hassan calls it in an author’s note, at the same time arguing that it’s an art dangerously and perhaps inextricably entangled with power. “Theater, in the western sense, is systematized manipulation,” they write. Making it, and, implicitly, consuming it, is an act of “emptying your vessel to be filled by the will of whomever can afford to be an artist these days.” If that premise sounds bleak, they go on to offer a battle plan: “I hope to exorcise the theater’s addiction to power, and sever power’s grasp upon theater.” In this spirit, Practice functions like a piece of gut-churning investigative journalism, an exposé of root rot. Its story is fiction, but versions of the events it portrays have played out hundreds, even thousands of times, on every scale, from the grade-school classroom to the artists’ commune to the professional rehearsal hall.
Hassan’s scenario intermittently evokes all three: In a converted church in Brooklyn, a scenester auteur called Asa Leon (Ronald Peet, compact in body, terrifying in presence) has gathered a group of actors to be a part of — not quite a play, more a devised performance experiment. They will draw from their own lives to create the piece, and they’ll live together for eight weeks as a collective while working on it. Then they’ll take it to Berlin and London (at the mention of Berlin, these performers thrill like the thespians of Blaine, Missouri, at the suggestion of Broadway). A “commission from Schauspielhaus Scheiße” will fund the project, along with Asa’s MacArthur grant. (“Not that I would label myself as a genius,” the director demurs coyly.) After their first day of work — an easygoing smattering of theater games and get-to-know-you exercises — the company, including Asa’s partner and designer, Walton (Mark Junek), and dramaturg, Danny (Alex Wyse), sit down to eat together. As a kind of grace, Asa encourages them to embrace discomfort: “I feel compelled to reiterate,” they say softly (Asa says everything softly), “how … destabilizing it could be. It’s an intense form of exposure, one that I put myself through every time I make work. It’s important to remember that the destabilization is just proof of your growth, your change.” The ensemble nod eagerly, eyes shimmering. Then Asa, all gentle smiles and wise, enigmatic pauses, has Danny pull out a chart with all the actors’ names on it. This, they purr, is how the company will “hold each other accountable.” Under a list of values, everyone can put marks where they think their colleagues “need some work.” At the end of each week, the number of marks someone has received will determine whether there are “no adjustments necessary” or whether there’s “a need to reassess your needs and our needs.”
The horror, the horror. The beast is out, it’s skulking through the house, and if this were a monster movie, it would have just made its first kill. The victim: everyone’s autonomy. The fact that all seven actors — from the naïve Savannah (Amandla Jahava) to the guarded Angelique (Maya Margarita) — gamely agree to Asa’s plan, even collaboratively generating the values for the chart, makes it all more gruesome, not less. They are cooperating in their own obliteration and feeling the rush of validation every step of the way.
Practice is broken into a pair of bravely nonstandard pieces: a two-hour first act in which we watch the company rehearse, and a roughly 40-minute second act in which we witness the poison fruits of their labor, a performance that Asa titles Self Awareness Exercise 001. Hassan, formerly the dramaturg at the Royal Court Theatre, has an architect’s gift for structure and a truly distinctive voice, at once deceptively nonchalant, fluent in both Gen-Z and institutional artspeak, and, behind its veils of casualness, scathing, hyperintellectual, and ambitious. (Their character descriptions provide not only age, race, and pronouns, but star sign: Keeyon, played by Hayward Leach, is “faggy, chaotic” and, of course, a Gemini.) If Practice has a weakness, it’s that the play’s long first act leaves no room for doubt over Asa’s menace — or, for that matter, that of their snaky partner Walton. The monstrous shadows of these so-called artists loom from the get-go — in Asa’s case, from even before we meet them in the flesh. Hassan begins the show with the actors’ auditions for the project, an ominously slow-burning and (especially where the wonderful Susannah Perkins’s affectless German performance artist Rinni is concerned) very funny sequence in which each one stands in a spotlight and receives notes from the invisible director over a microphone. In theater slang, it’s called the God Mic. And as each auditioner’s body transforms upon hearing the disembodied voice — from projected confidence in their performance to inward-folding vulnerability, a child’s search for encouragement and approval — it’s easy to see why Hassan believes theater has a power problem.
It’s all a touch easy to see, from Asa’s establishment of the sinister values chart to their insidious coaxing of stories of trauma out of mellow Ro (Opa Adeyemo) and nervous Tristan (Omar Shafiuzzaman) to, eventually, the Milgram-experiment levels of psychological violence they inflict on one poor actor, Mel (Karina Curet), whom they accuse of stealing their supply of artisanal jellybeans. But Hassan’s second act ultimately clarifies that Practice isn’t going for mystery as much as blunt-force impact. The revelations of Act Two add a crucial and, if possible, even more nauseating filter on the accruing violence of Act One — like an optometrist dropping a new lens and asking better or worse? Both.
Act Two is also, ironically, a wild showcase for Practice’s actors, as they embody characters subsumed to the corrupt will of their great leader and yet, both diegetically and non-diegetically, perform an extraordinary ensemble feat. With the collaboration of director Keenan Tyler Oliphant and his partner in shaping the show’s movement, Camden Gonzalez, they achieve stretches of unison choreo — that would earn the respect of a Moscow corps de ballet. Parodying experimental performance is one of the easiest dunks for any theater artist to make, and in crafting Asa’s “self–awareness exercise,” Hassan, Oliphant, and the show’s designers impressively avoid cheap shots shots. It’s unquestionably satire, but it’s also seriously considered and sincerely wrought. Underneath the lurid spectacle, Hassan is in fact advancing an empathetic hypothesis: that abusers are re-creating the abuse they received, and that they are begging, through public acts of violence, to be stopped. I’m not sure I agree that all brutality has such neatly diagnosable roots, but whatever our theories of power, Hassan is right: In practice, it needs an exorcism.
Practice is at Playwrights Horizons through December 7.
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