'Practice' Off-Broadway review — provocative play asks where creativity ends and manipulation begins

Read our review of Practice off Broadway, a new drama written by Nazareth Hassan and directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant at Playwrights Horizons.

Summary

• Practice is a play about a theatre troupe whose leader manipulates the actors as they create a play about themselves
• The show is excellently unsettling and challenging as it explores how far people will go to belong
• The show has elicited strong responses from theatregoers
• The show is recommended for fans of films like The Red Shoes; Black Swan; and Whiplash

What counts as "provocative" in recent New York theatre mostly involves a playwright planting their flag on one side of current culture wars in oft-tired ways. But Nazareth Hassan’s Practice, about a theatre troupe whose leader, Asa (Ronald Peet), uses tactics that quickly veer into the cultish, is one of the most genuinely provocative works on the stage this season, and perhaps most seasons.

Asa’s voice comes from the back of the room at the start of the show, godlike and looking down on the potential troupe members as they audition with a monologue about desire, freedom, recklessness, and control. The leader identifies something within the actors that they themselves cannot perceive, voice booming yet cradling. When they gather in the basement of a church that’s been transformed into a theatre and rehearsal space for them, the group’s bonds form under the eager ears of microphones placed all around the stage, drinking up every secret exchanged, story told, and confidence placed.

Asa uses New Age mindfulness rhetoric, rigorous workouts-as-discipline, and psychological warfare to extract the actors' hidden pains and fears. Dressed in flowing shawls as they lurk over rehearsals like a gargoyle, Asa has a voice that falsely suggests tenderness, understanding, and openness to the creative process.

Practice is an impressive feat, not only because of its documentary-like style, but because of how its presentation forces the audience to confront the show’s actual conception. Its intriguing ambiguity transcends its flaws — a few indulgent, on-the-nose monologues, pitilessly dramatizing a terrible environment without offering a solution — as one watches a kind of emotional Grand Guignol play out over the course of 3 hours: first as formation, then as “performance.” By the show’s second act, Hassan has created a nightmarish feedback loop of spectatorship and audience indictment.

It’s one thing to see actors playing actors going off the rails, like in John Cassavetes’s Opening Night. It’s another thing to see them meld demented self-help language and artistic process mantras together, repeating “It’s okay that I am useless” and “I am useless and that’s okay” over and over again. Practice gleefully treads a line of horror throughout.

Keenan Tyler Oliphant’s patient direction sucks you into this world where the path to making art is worth the harshness, loneliness, and self-laceration. Artists from Lady Gaga to Florence Welch have publicly discussed the legacy of the tortured artist archetype, particularly the endless loop of enabling and concern from the public and the industry. If Practice offers no solution, it at least lays out, in visceral detail, the harrowing experience of offering yourself up for art and the electrifying feeling of sacrificing your body to a collective.

Practice summary

A group of young actors joins a theatre troupe to devise a piece where the actors themselves are the subject of the performance. In the process, some of them slowly begin to realize (though most don’t) that their leader is using cultish tactics to isolate and intimidate them.

What to expect at Practice

With some of the most vivid lighting design currently on stage in NYC, Masha Tsimring illuminates Afsoon Pajoufar's excellent charcoal-painted sets with a kind of cinematic intensity. Blue spotlights zero in on intimate moments between cast members, and a large rectangular white light board shakes the troupe awake to each day’s practice.

What audiences are saying about Practice

Practice has a 67% approval rating on the review aggregator Show-Score. Though this average score is middle-of-the-road, the responses are anything but, with many theatregoers sharing passionately polarized views on the show.

• "This is definitely the case of you will love it or hate it. I LOVED it. Yes Act 1 is VERY LONG, but I never looked at my watch. I was enthralled with these characters and honestly I found it often very funny. The cast is so good. I loved the dynamics at play here. Often a single glance often not even by the characters who were in focus made it so fascinating. I think its one of the best shows of the fall." - Show-Score user Member 71793246
• "Three hours of watching actors be treated terribly onstage, watching them inflict verbal and eventually physical violence on each other was triggering beyond belief." - Show-Score user Eduardo 5312
• "A deeply disturbing show. I understand its intent to explore power and surrender. The performance struck me as a voyeuristic portrayal of a 'cult' leader character and his cruel, manipulative, and capricious actions. I don't shy away from challenging content; however, this struck different. The show made me feel complicit in the humiliation and degradation of the actors." - Show-Score user Kendra 6325
• "Okay yes, insider baseball, but the writing is SO sharp. The way that an enigmatic, secure, yet deeply narcissistic human can create the cult-like experience that is devising theatre... or training in the theatre... the interpersonal dynamics and gaslighting of figuring out the line of rigor/commitment vs. abuse. Such wonderful acting. Such wonderful insane twists. Such out of pocket, uncomfortable, beautiful awkward moments. I loved it. Oh, also, the second act is so precisely done that you're like... am I pretentious or is this good? Also the lighting and set are so dynamic, inventive, and Bella Donna. Chefs kiss." - Show-Score user Alice 5320

Read more audience reviews of Practice on Show-Score.

Who should see Practice

• Practice sits neatly alongside other works about the dizzyingly off-kilter balance between art, suffering, sacrifice, and systematic exploitation, like The Red Shoes, Black Swan, and Whiplash.
• Theatergoers looking for a savage look at the kind of behavior that’s accepted in conservatory spaces will be interested in Practice’s take.
• Fans of Nazareth Hassan’s previous show, Bowl EP, will be glad to know that Practice is even better.

Learn more about Practice off Broadway

Deeply unsettling and deliciously challenging, Practice is a wildly hypnotic psychodrama about group dynamics and the horrors people will agree to participate in to reach something higher and bigger than themselves.

Learn more and get Practice tickets on New York Theatre Guide. Practice is at Playwrights Horizons through December 7.

Photo credit: Practice off Broadway. (Photos by Alexander Mejía, Bergamot)