Incognito
Review by Holli Harms
26 May 2016
With a splash of light and burst of music Incognito explodes onto the stage and there you are on this incredible ride for the next 90 minutes. Doug Hughes' direction of Nick Payne's brilliant script is so spot on, so meticulous and moving at the speed of light that there is no room for you to exhale. The actors, all four of them, play a total of 26 characters with no costume changes just their voices, body language and attitude melding seamlessly from one character to another. It is a tour-de-force for these incredibly skilled performers. They're jaw-dropping good.
The set is minimal, just 4 chairs because Ben Stanton's lighting is so sublime that it is all that is needed for us to imagine the other worlds. David Van Tieghem's sound design - primal rock and roll. I could use extra super adjectives here and there again and again, but really all you need to know is that this is why we have theatre; this is its magic, its lesson, its humanity.
I don't really want to tell you more. Not this time. I want you to go and see it. This is the off-Broadway scene as it should be, intimate and at the same time expansive, thought provoking, exciting and surprising. See Geneva Carr and Charlie Cox and Heather Lind and Morgan Spector simply blow your mind. And that is what the play is about - your mind. Oh, I've already said too much.
Don't read anything about it. Just go, with a friend if you can and then go out after for a drink or coffee and sit and talk about what you saw, how you feel, what adjectives you would use to describe your experience.
(Holli Harms)
"The biggest mystery of all, the one that dominates every aspect of this lively, self-examining drama of ideas, is the very apparatus that you're using to make sense of this sentence. I mean your brain."
Ben Brantley for New York Times
"Doug Hughes directs a solid cast (Cox is especially brilliant as the sweetly tragic Henry) in what is an impressive acting workout—if not completely revelatory drama."
David Cote for Time Out New York
"This intricate drama concerning the vagaries of the human brain is bound to tax yours."
Frank Scheck for Hollywood Reporter
"Director Doug Hughes and movement director Peter Pucci run themselves ragged moving 20 lifeless characters (played by four hard-working actors) around the spare stage handsomely set by Scott Pask and lighted by Ben Stanton. But for all that work, Payne's treatment of his philosophical subject remains leaden in theatrical form."
Marilyn Stasio for Variety
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