The Brooklyn Rail

Vulnerability. Respect. Honesty. Rigor. Curiosity. These are the characters’ community agreements that set the tone in Practice, a new dark comedy by Nazareth Hassan, directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant. The play, now showing at Playwrights Horizons through December 7, follows a company of ambitious actors starring in the latest work by the buzzy Asa Leon (Ronald Peet)— a hotshot theater director. Eager to please, the actors come up with these house rules with trepidacious smiles on their first night in an old Brooklyn church-turned-theater, where they have agreed to cohabitate for experimental, live-in rehearsals.

My mind wanders to the tenets I have committed to while sitting in liberal arts classrooms, practicing yoga, or dancing in queer nightlife venues. It’s these kinds of well-intentioned collective doctrines, often colored with descriptors that anyone can get behind, that sprout ideologies—belief systems that when dictated by the right charismatic leader can be wielded to oppress and manipulate. Practice is a witty portrait of such abuse of power, written like a familiar cautionary tale. Much like the teacher who leads with tough love, or the coach who inspires with mind games, Asa, the zealous director, is an archetype for a leader hungry to control. Meanwhile, his obsequious cast reveals just how easy it is to fall prey to groupthink when baited with the promise of inclusion.

It’s this gnawing desire to belong—but, also, to make it—that strips an otherwise eclectic cast of characters of their personal agency throughout their time together. Yet the descent into uniformity is a gradual one. Hassan builds psychological friction through the unsettlingly intimate demands of the medium of theater itself, staged via a repertoire of rigorous group activities. From dusk til dawn, the company participates in collective runs, meditation circles, and personal storytelling sessions that blur together across repetitive scenes. Each actor is due for a moment in the hot seat, ramping up the tension throughout training as Asa zeroes in on each cast member’s darkest moments, one by one. It is not until Angelique (Maya Margarita) refuses to share—and faces the consequences for doing so—that I begin to experience emotional whiplash. Are these raw confessions really conventional drama school exercises? They feel more like curated humiliation rituals and Asa, who wears a wry smile throughout, might just have a serious humiliation kink. But perhaps this is what theater, or anything that we love so much we want to be “good” for, is all about—offering up our most vulnerable parts for the review, critique, and interrogation of others.

As spectators, we do not remain unscathed by the persistent scrutiny; we are obedient participants in Asa’s testy durational performance. After two long hours of observing the cast scrub themselves raw of their idiosyncrasies, we have been implicated. We have watched them replicate each other’s foundational trauma with the same flippancy that they would try on new pairs of sunglasses. And after intermission, they unveil the masterpiece that they have been fastidiously training for. Self Awareness Exercise 001 is an operatic play about the actors themselves, premiering in an avant-garde theater in Berlin that’s reminiscent of the city’s notorious Volksbühne Theater. Afsoon Pajoufar’s eerily meta set is designed for fishbowl viewership—like test subjects, we watch the cast behind one-sided glass—we can see them, but they can’t see us.

Under Masha Tsimring’s grating synthetic lights, the actors emerge masked and dressed in Brenda Abbandandolo’s identical gold costumes. And before us, they simulate a spectrum of difficult emotions that depict the human condition through a twisted, almost holographic lens. As if digitally composed, Camden Gonzales and Oliphant choreograph chilling gestural synchronicity among the actors. Like puppets they dissolve into a singular chorus; rarely is one voice distinct from another. They are no longer humans but empty vessels, mannequins reproducing the dark facets of their once wholesome community values. Terms like “fear,” “gaslighting,” “triangulation,” and “isolation” frame the grand glass arena that is both their stage and cage—it’s these wayward scruples that now reign.

Hassan’s writing is particularly menacing in this second act. Together, the cast narrates Asa’s pursuit of power across a vengeful harangue. Here, Hassan not only gets to the core of why one would follow those who mistreat them, but they also asks the audience to consider why one harms others to begin with. Like “Lemon Pepper Wings,” a curmudgeonous inner demon character whose final monologue I still carry with me from Bowl EP—Hassan’s previous work that debuted at Vineyard Theatre last spring—Asa is written with harrowing self-criticality. It’s through Asa that Hassan reveals the ugliest parts of being human in Practice. They show us the kind of malicious intentions that keep people up at night and the insidious actions they might perform if pushed just far enough.

But in the same breath, they also portray the punishing self-hate that it takes to provoke such desire to harm. Words like “useless” are recurring weapons of degradation, inflected on the cast members who sing a haunting elegy about despising themselves. It is revealed that Asa too has experienced existential belittling and I linger in this irony. In the sick world in which we live, overwrought with neoliberal self-interest, to disempower others is to take the fast lane towards self-preservation.

I am well aware that I am pushing it here—perhaps there is no utility in reflecting on the “why” when it comes to foul play or abuse. At the same time, it’s challenging to look away from the horrifying, absurd, and comical manifestations of power that scramble for the limelight from every direction throughout Practice. Here, everyone is complicit in their choices; everyone seeks influence, be it creative or otherwise, because, to be influential is to feel empowered. And so, I leave Practice—a play that wrestles with a deluge of contradictions—submerged in a hurricane of discomfort. Why is it so important to feel chosen?