The Brooklyn Rail

A pre-show announcement sounds, directing the audience to silence all cell phones. This is a good indication that the play they have come to see is about to begin. A second announcement sounds, same as the first: silence all cell phones. More emphatic by dint of repetition, but no change in the voice. It sounds again. And again. And again, ad nauseam. In theater, generally, this kind of thing is a sign that something metaphorical is about to happen.

But if the form cannot bear such broad generalizations, Bellamy Brewster and Ewan Lloyd’s debut play LINES posits a kind of strong theory pointed in the other direction—not about the art, but about the industry. The play, which runs through July 3 at Theatre 154, takes place in an audition waiting room, abstracted by all the above, plus seven high-backed silver chairs, a stone fireplace flanked by some medieval weaponry, and a glossy floor just uneven enough to not quite reflect what’s atop it. While the set transparently calls back to Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, which posed that hell was an eternity of other people’s company, the horror of LINES consists in the looming prospect of being asked to leave.

An audition moderator (Paul Niebanck) in a suit and socks enters from the audience, welcoming those of us watching with a koan or two about art and life. He disappears, and a slow procession of actors of all kinds begins: first, nervous wreck Isaac (Lloyd); then suave, satin-clad Vernon (Bryce-David King); rookie Isabella (Genevieve Ngosa Daniels); freewheeling harmonicist Ellis (James Louis Wagner); showbiz doyenne Julia (Penny Balfour); classically-trained Julia-devotee Victoria (Nancy Kimball); and finally, former Marine Marcus (Kelechi Udenkwo), a non-actor whose acting teacher has seen in him an unrefined depth.

Vernon stretches, Victoria espies Julia, Isaac stops just short of self-flagellation: this opening act asks its actors to perform the terrifying task of behavior. Eminently watchable, these moments of waiting for the moderator make for a nice-enough take on the more Sartrean elements of a career in performance. But the moderator does reemerge, shepherding the auditioners one by one into an adjacent audition room where they introduce themselves to an unseen panel, somewhere out in the distance. The lights go dark before strobing; bass and high screeches fuzz through blown-out speakers. The lights go back to normal as each hopeful reemerges into the waiting room, now holding a plain black book filled, they soon find, with folktales and fables that they are to follow “faithfully.” An instruction manual, a script; it’s something like a Bible.

The scheme plays itself out: the auditioners assign themselves roles and hope to avoid the moderator’s gaze when he circles the stage every now and then, looking through the windows like some punitive anthropologist. At the end of each tale, he pulls an actor or two into the audition room for a confessional, then comes out to announce their departure, or disappearance. The pool shrinks: Isabella goes first, then Isaac, then Ellis, who looks at the audience and proclaims, “This is a real exit. Not a performance.” Fine, but Wagner’s magnetic fuck-you aura make this “real” exit (and what had the others been?) seem like par for the course. What if such a proclamation had come from Victoria, whom Kimball imbues with a heartbreaking stubbornness as she tries with all her might to impress her invisible judges? Or, for that matter, from Daniels’s wide-eyed Isabella, who remains inspiringly, if naively, unjaded?

In the end, only Julia and Marcus remain. They turn to the last story in their books: Faust. These two make symbols of both the exceptional (hothouse flower, flawed oracle) and the hopelessly obedient (veterans, albeit of different types). LINES sees the latter as something even stronger: emptiness. They play out the tale, kind of. The actress “wins.” Marcus goes. And as the moderator lords over her, Balfour’s Julia crawls across the floor destitute, self-sacrificing, impossible not to watch. The moderator tells her she’s gotten the part. Once again. The play restarts briefly before a blackout.

Reductively speaking, LINES is a play about lines: literal ones, yes, but also cultural codes, industry norms, unwritten rules. If Julia’s kind of stardom comes with some type of spiritual bankruptcy, as the script suggests, it gives us neither a sense of her sacrifices nor of the consequences of the other characters’ eliminations. Even Balfour’s state of utter debasement is too theatrically interesting to read as anything but teeming with life. The show’s pessimism can’t bear the vivacity its cast brings to their roles. In an early fable from their black books, for instance, Isaac and Victoria play a married couple locked in a bet that hinges on their mutual silence. The electricity that Kimball and Lloyd conjure might as well go on forever; one can’t imagine that being so bad, after all.

LINES is strongest in moments like these, when Lloyd and Brewster (who also directs) give their characters space not to talk, when they can sit in silence before casting them forth into an allegedly foregone conclusion. For a play that circles a grand theme of existential compromise, these hyper-literate, culture-savvy playwrights seem to have made very few. Design choices, too, from Obid Abdurakhmanov’s colored strobes to Pili Weeber’s glossy, abstract waiting room might be best described as unapologetic, the furthest thing from pejorative in a world where sticking to one’s guns is supposedly punishable by, well, we don’t quite know.

An unanswered question, a key: what exactly are the actors in LINES auditioning for? If Faust sold his soul to the devil in exchange for infinite knowledge, it’s not clear what these characters might get in exchange for breaking with their spiritual, artistic integrity. The title of “artist” maybe? Comparison with a Johann Wolfgang von Goethe character? No one mentions a role, much less a play, and where this might help with the general vibe of “metaphor,” it also brings us to metaphor’s limit. Art happens, one hopes, when such integrity touches down in the face of risk, when it finds something to congeal around. Does anyone here have a chance?

Perhaps it’s not a metaphor, then, just an exaggeration, or a misrecognition. LINES describes a world where art means image and image means everything. This world doesn’t hold, at least not yet, when new playwrights and diverse casts continue to show up, “real exits” or not, every night to put on something flawed and striving. The artists at work inside the play and out could just as easily resign to the necessary evils of showbusiness, the beige-ification of identity and artistry, or whatever. But despite where the script takes us, the characters here show Lloyd’s and Brewster’s hands to be—embarrassingly, bravely—more optimistic than they’d like to admit.