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    ‘What Became of Us’ Review: Reflections on a Family’s Immigration Tale

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    Shayan Lotfi’s topical play about a family building a new life in a new country leaves the details vague, deliberately.Details are sparse in Shayan Lotfi’s play “What Became of Us,” but the imprecision is by design. Onstage at Atlantic Stage 2 in Manhattan, the two-hander is meant to be one size fits all, to a degree: a story of immigration that doesn’t specify its characters’ country — neither the one they quit, in the Global South, nor the one they adopt, in the Global North.Q (Rosalind Chao), the daughter of the family, is alone onstage when she begins mining her memories of what she will always call “the Old Country,” from which she emigrated with her parents when she was 6.“They wanted to leave because of the economic, and the political,” she says, her vagueness allowing space for imagination. “They wanted to leave to find autonomy, and safety.”And, she suggests, they wanted their then-only child not to be frightened by the momentous change they had decided on: “They explained the journey to me using words from the fantastical stories I loved to read: adventure, new, exciting.”Q’s gaze hovers above the audience, but she is not talking to us. These recollections are for Z (BD Wong), her sibling, who was born in what she calls “This Country,” when Q was 7. For all of them, the new baby would be “a root into This Country that could never be ripped out.”Does it need mentioning that there is nothing sinister in that sentiment — that their parents were simply building their family as they built a new life in a new place, to which they wanted to be connected? Such are the electrified politics around immigration these days, and not just in the United States, that maybe it does.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘El Otro Oz’ Review: There’s No Place Like (Your Ancestral) Home

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      A tender reimagining of “The Wizard of Oz” follows Dora, an angsty American teenager who initially rejects her family’s Mexican heritage.Every dramatization of “The Wizard of Oz” seems to offer a pilgrimage to the Emerald City. But “El Otro Oz,” the inspired and imaginative interpretation now playing at Atlantic Stage 2, introduces additional journeys that are ultimately more poignant and profound.When I first saw this Latin-flavored retelling of L. Frank Baum’s tale two years ago, I was most impressed by its comic inventiveness. (TheaterWorksUSA presented it then as a revised, more bilingual version of its own 2011 show “The Yellow Brick Road.”) That 2022 production, retitled “El Otro Oz” (Spanish for “The Other Oz”), included a pet Chihuahua named Toquito, a wizard who’s a disco diva and, in place of the withered Wicked Witch of the West, the sultry, flamenco-costumed Bruja del Oeste, whose magical castanets evoke a predatory rattlesnake.None of these creative flourishes have changed, but whether it’s because of world events or the nuances of Melissa Crespo’s direction, I found this new production by Atlantic for Kids (the young people’s division of Atlantic Theater Company) as tender and moving as it is ebullient and funny.With a book by Mando Alvarado and Tommy Newman, and music and lyrics by Newman and Jaime Lozano, the show focuses on Dora (Nya Noemi, passionate and clear-voiced), an angsty adolescent in contemporary Chicago. More an admirer of Beyoncé than of merengue, the American-born Dora deeply resents her Mexican immigrant mother’s plans for a quinceañera, the traditional celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday. After she reluctantly dons a voluminous pastel dress for the occasion, Dora wails, “I look like cotton candy!” (Stephanie Echevarria designed the vivid costumes.)Before long, a mysterious healer appears, telling Dora she is only “half of the whole.” (Christian Adriana Johannsen juggles this role expertly with that of the seductive bruja.) Then the teenager is swept into El Otro Oz, where, according to one of its residents, her family’s picnic table has crushed the witch’s sister “flat as a Dorito.”Once Dora acquires the enchanted ruby slippers, she must, of course, reach the wizard. But she’s also beginning to understand that she has embraced only part of who she is. As she explores El Otro Oz with new friends — the Scarecrow (Adriel Jovian); the Iron Chef (Eli Gonzalez), who travels with a food cart instead of an oil can; and the meek Mountain Lion (Danny Lemache) — she comes to appreciate the heritage that she has often cruelly rejected. The score, which blends mariachi-style melodies with emotive show tunes, offers ample opportunities for Dora to practice traditional dance, and young audiences may find that Alessandra Valea’s joyful choreography makes it hard to sit still.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      In ‘A Simulacrum,’ Steve Cuiffo Has Nothing Up His Sleeves

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      The magician worked with the playwright Lucas Hnath to create “a more vulnerable version of magic performance,” Hnath said.Steve Cuiffo began performing magic the way that most kids do. His brother did tricks. So did an older cousin. A grandfather had a routine with a handkerchief and a dime that absolutely killed. While he was in elementary school, he started entertaining at birthday parties, first for $5 and then more. He kept up his routines even as he studied theater at New York University and began to work with avant-garde companies like the Wooster Group.“I always had a deck of cards in my hand,” he said recently. “I still kind of do.” (Technically, on the afternoon of our interview, they were in his shirt pocket.)For some years, he kept acting and illusionism separate. But gradually he combined them: first with “Major Bang,” a nuclear-terror comedy for the Foundry Theater, and then through work with Rainpan 43, which premiered the ecstatic magic lampoon, “Elephant Room.” He was also a magic consultant on other productions (television shows and movies, too), including Lucas Hnath’s 2013 play “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney.” (He and Hnath had overlapped at N.Y.U., but only became friendly later.)One day, during rehearsals for “Disney,” while watching Cuiffo teach the actor Larry Pine how to cough up bloody handkerchiefs, Hnath recalled telling that show’s director, Sarah Benson, “I could just watch that all day long.”Cuiffo performs both classic tricks and some new ones, including a few that fail.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd now he can. Cuiffo and Hnath have created “A Simulacrum,” which includes both classic tricks (the ambitious card, the torn and restored newspaper) and some new ones. Unusually for a magic show, it also incorporates several tricks that fail. Because “A Simulacrum,” running through July 9 at Atlantic Stage 2, is less a demonstration of magic than a deconstruction of how and why magic is made. To perform it, Cuiffo, 45, had to unlearn most of his habits, to strip away any vestige of showmanship.“This whole show is trying to answer that question of what is magic,” said Cuiffo, sunk into a couch in his dressing room, deep underground at the Atlantic Stage 2 space in Chelsea, and dressed in magician-appropriate all-black.His offstage persona is fairly close to the stage one he favors — rumpled, excitable, mildly sardonic, casually authoritative. Writing in The Times, Maya Phillips complimented his unflashy stage presence: “He’s low-key, grounded in both his gestures and his manner of speech.” If there is space between the man he is and the man he plays when he’s making cards appear and disappear, he can’t quite find it.“If I had a therapist, maybe I could answer that,” he said.Cuiffo, a familiar face Off Broadway, is unusual both in how he fuses magic and theater, which few performers do, and in how he appears to combine rigor with a seeming spontaneity.“He’s this great improvisational performer at his deepest core,” said Christine Jones, who was moved to create the one-on-one performance event Theater for One after Cuiffo performed close-up magic for her at a wedding. “But of course that’s balanced with hours and hours and hours of practice that is not improvisational at all.”Earlier work: Cuiffo, far right, with Trey Lyford, left, and Geoff Sobelle, center, as dorky-cool suburbanites with a fixation on sleight-of-hand in “Elephant Room: Dust From the Stars,” a play performed on Zoom in 2020.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGeoff Sobelle, who created “Elephant Room” and its sequel, “Elephant Room: Dust From the Stars,” with Cuiffo and the actor Trey Lyford, described a different balancing act, a reverence for and an impatience with magic as an art form.“As much as he loves this stuff,” Sobelle said, “he also totally wants to tear it down and just rip it apart.”After “Disney,” he created the mentalism routine for Hnath’s “The Thin Place,” a ghost story about a woman with supposed psychic powers, and the vanishing act in “Dana H.,” a first-person account of the kidnapping of Hnath’s mother. When “Dana H.” premiered at the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, a member of the company’s artistic staff commissioned this new magic show by Hnath and Cuiffo.Their first of three workshops for what became “A Simulacrum” took place on East 15th Street in August 2021. The collaborators had set a few parameters. Hnath, who was raised as an evangelical Christian, had performed magic as a teenager, typically as a way to illustrate Gospel lessons. That experience has made him allergic to both audience participation and flimflam, so they had decided on a format that was closer to an interview.“I really wanted to find a way to make a magic show that I would want to watch,” Hnath said in a recent interview. “I wanted to make an honest magic show.”Hnath also decided they would record the workshops, which ultimately ran to 50 hours. Hnath then edited the recordings, with his voice appearing on tape and Cuiffo recreating, at each performance, his own side of the conversation.“We’ve set it up so I don’t have to act,” Cuiffo said.Cuiffo recalled his excitement for that first workshop. He had plenty of tricks to show Hnath, some old, some new. He figured they would choose the best ones and refine them. But as he moved from one to the next, Hnath remained unimpressed. The routines felt too polished, too slick. Hnath preferred messiness.“I wanted to see how much I could stack on top of him and still watch him wriggle his way out,” Hnath said of Cuiffo. “He really is a magnificent problem solver.”Victor Llorente for The New York Times“I like the real mistakes, not the fake ones,” he said. “Too often magic and performance feels superhuman. I was interested in a more vulnerable version of magic performance.”In anticipation of the second workshop, to be held three months later, Hnath set up several impossible or nearly impossible tasks: Cuiffo had to create a trick that would realize some fantasy or desire, a trick that would fail, a trick in which the outcome would be a surprise and — this prompt was possibly the hardest — a trick that Cuiffo’s wife, the actress Eleanor Hutchins, would love. (As Hutchins confirmed in an email, most magic makes her “uncomfortable.”)“I wanted to see how much I could stack on top of him and still watch him wriggle his way out,” Hnath said. “Because he really is a magnificent problem solver.”That second workshop, as the show reveals, didn’t go very well. “Brutal” and “stressful” were the words that Cuiffo used to describe it. A perfectionist, Cuiffo struggled with the prompts. These were problems that he couldn’t solve, at least not in the way that Hnath required. Eventually, the workshop devolved into a two-hour fight, which erupted when Hnath critiqued the props that Cuiffo planned to use in the trick for Hutchins as “cheating.”“That got gnarly,” Cuiffo recalled. “Like, are you telling me how I need to make a piece for my wife?”There was one further workshop, which forms the show’s third act, although to say too much about it would be to blight the surprise. Cuiffo did eventually develop a trick and Hutchins confirmed that she did in fact love it.“It was unexpected, understated and personal,” she wrote in an email. “It was cute, funny and nice, just like Steve.”The show was designed to be about process, not product, however funny and nice. Despite the stress and the arguments, Cuiffo said that he enjoyed having Hnath as a collaborator and goad.“He strategically broke down all that [expletive] I usually do,” Cuiffo said.Making illusions without any of the patter, the showmanship, the razzle-dazzle? That, he has learned, is a kind of magic, too. More

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      ‘A Simulacrum’ Review: A Magic Show in the Making, and Unmaking

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      The magician Steve Cuiffo and the playwright Lucas Hnath try to find the reality beneath the illusions in this Atlantic Theater Company production.Magicians often get a bad rap. After all, it’s a profession necessarily defined by deception.But what are some of these untruths in magic, and what are they meant to obscure? That’s what the playwright Lucas Hnath and the magician Steve Cuiffo explore in “A Simulacrum,” a kind of deconstructed magic show that attempts to find the reality beneath the illusions.At the start of “A Simulacrum,” directed by Hnath and produced by Atlantic Theater Company, Cuiffo strolls onstage to one of two large folding tables that are positioned perpendicular to each other. He puts down his drink and pops a tape into a cassette recorder.It’s Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021, at an East Village rehearsal studio, where Hnath and Cuiffo are workshopping a possible show. Rather, this production is a re-creation of that Aug. 10 workshop. (An author’s note in the script calls it a “stage documentary.”) Hnath is the unseen interviewer; his parts, questioning Cuiffo’s methods and history with magic, are culled from over 50 hours of workshops and interviews between them, and played aloud — presumably via the recorder. Cuiffo performs his tricks in person and acts out his side of the conversation, which has been taken verbatim from these workshops.The second act of the show, which was commissioned by the Center Theater Group in Los Angeles, replicates a workshop Hnath and Cuiffo had three months after the first, during which Hnath challenges Cuiffo to devise new tricks with a set of criteria that negate or undercut the illusion, polish and showmanship that typically define magic shows. The third act, based on another workshop a year later, reveals Cuiffo’s creations.Cuiffo makes it clear that this show presents “presentational magic,” not “personal magic” — that is, the staging is more one-sided, absent the transactional element that comes with audience participation. It’s just an aside, but it epitomizes how the show moves, from a more traditional magic show format, with disappearing coins and autonomous cards that jump and flip on and around his person, to something more intimate.Hnath’s blunt interrogations (“Where is Steve in this?”) and matter-of-fact reactions (“That’s it?” he asks after Cuiffo performs a card trick that took him 14 years to master), though sometimes difficult to hear with the tape’s poor sound quality, reveal an incisive thinker. That should be no surprise to those familiar with his work, like “The Thin Place,” a kind of ghost story, and “Dana H.,” another simulacrum involving a real, harrowing story about Hnath’s mother that is lip-synced to a recording of her recounting the experience. (It remains one of the most unforgettable experiences I’ve had in a theater.) And yet, at times this production too explicitly spells out his conceit, as when Hnath questions how much of Cuiffo’s magic is mimicry, each trick being a variation of a theme — yes, a simulacrum.Ultimately this is a show with an intentionally self-defeating concept: One that breaks down the artifice of an art form by employing another art form that uses a similar kind of artifice to reveal some aspect of humanity. But there’s an occasional tediousness to this behind-the-scenes, making-of endeavor, and a few moments of built-in dissatisfaction, as when Cuiffo has to perform tricks that he knows won’t work.An engaging performer, Cuiffo subverts the splashy style that many professional magicians are known for; he’s low-key, grounded in both his gestures and his manner of speech. And the difficulty of what he’s doing shouldn’t be understated: He’s not just repeating his part of the dialogue but replicating his pauses, cadence, emphases naturally and in sync with Hnath’s audio.As carefully considered as this production is, with Louisa Thompson’s modest scenic design (two tables, an office-window backdrop) and Hnath’s cerebral direction, ultimately there is still the sense that something is missing: a deeper interrogation of Cuiffo and Hnath himself, something even more personal. We never get the full reveal.What magic and theater have in common is the wonder, the spectacle that ironically sends you back to your reality with a new outlook. But maintaining the magic while showing your hand? That’s the trick this show hasn’t quite yet mastered.A SimulacrumThrough July 2 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Review: In ‘Sex, Grift and Death,’ One-Acts That Test Perceptions

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      PTP/NYC, celebrating its 35th repertory season, returns to New York with short works by Steven Berkoff and Caryl Churchill.Two strangers on a park bench by the beach, partnering in a vicious dance of seduction. A woman from a family of swindlers, lying her way through dates with a wealthy new beau. Mourners at a funeral, and the deceased man himself, facing the frightening notion of the future and the afterlife to come.These scenarios, explored in three short, wily plays — “Lunch” (1983), by Steven Berkoff, and “Hot Fudge” (1989) and “Here We Go” (2015), by Caryl Churchill — create a triptych about the ways we love, lie or steal, and how we may act when the realities of the world don’t suit our expectations. Produced by PTP/NYC (Potomac Theater Project), the one-acts are being staged together at Atlantic Stage 2, where they recently opened under the title “Sex, Grift and Death.”In the first play, “Lunch,” directed by Richard Romagnoli for this New York premiere, a lonely salesman (Bill Army) spots a woman (Jackie Sanders) sitting on a park bench. The man approaches and begins an exchange — verbal but also physical, a pantomime of sex and combat — that reveals the primal urges that underlie courtship rituals.Army makes a virtue of his character’s sleaziness, so that even his outpouring of distasteful stream-of-consciousness thoughts, mixed with his desperate cajolery and odious asides, take on a kind of charm as he conspiratorially winks and nudges in the audience’s direction. Sanders’s character is aloof — calculating and willing to play the mating game but only on her terms. She’s both a player and an umpire, engaging him one moment and enforcing imaginary calls the next. Their verbal attacks feel like barbarous blows: “Your expressions are the buried side of a stone, moving with strange fetid life,” she fires at him. He describes her as a “lump of fornicatory stew.”A British playwright, director and actor, Berkoff is a kind of Shakespeare of invective, writing with a savagery of scorched earth warfare but also an alluring eloquence and imagination. A mad scramble of metaphors that activate the senses, Berkoff’s text for the two characters contains such indelicate imagery as “various succubi and incubi swarming” in a woman’s underwear, and boorish men in suits who “stream out like diarrhea” from their offices at 5 p.m.Berkoff’s script is written in a kind of speedy Morse code with asides, dashes and ellipses, all delivered in an unrelenting pace onstage. Under Romagnoli’s direction, the play moves like a speeding train — so fast that it throws you off, making it hard to get back onboard, which is unfortunate, given the compelling content and performances. Romagnoli incorporates physical theater — the kind of interpretive range of movement that characterizes much of Berkoff’s work — but even the more daring choreography and tableau, like the woman ripping open her shirt or straddling the man like a pony on a horse ranch, feels tame in comparison to the language.There’s a similar lack of punch in the Churchill works, both of which felt narratively incomplete and directionally imbalanced. “Hot Fudge,” the second play of the evening, begins with a family drinking in a pub and debating the best strategy for hustling banks out of money. Sonia (Molly Dorion) and her partner Matt (Gibson Grimm) lay out a convoluted scheme of deposits and withdrawals under fake names, but Sonia’s father, the cantankerous Charlie (Chris Marshall), praises the old tried-and-true stickup while his sloshed wife (Danielle Skraastad) makes crude jokes.This band of thieves is fascinating — enough to carry a whole play — and the perfect example of Churchill characters, who are often eccentric and inhabit unpredictable worlds. But there’s a bait and switch: The introduction of these relatives only for them to be forgotten doesn’t surprise as much as the shift to the character with the least amount of lines in that first scene — Sonia’s sister Ruby (Tara Giordano), who is thinking of getting out. Still, that doesn’t mean Ruby’s coming clean to her suitor, Colin (David Barlow), who thinks she’s the owner of a successful travel agency. Instead she doubles down on the lies as they go clubbing with his pretentious rich friends.From left: Chris Marshall, David Barlow, Tara Giordano, Teddy Best and Wynn McClenahan in Caryl Churchill’s “Hot Fudge,” directed by Cheryl Faraone.Stan BarouhThe last play, “Here We Go,” in its New York premiere, is similarly missing some bite. It begins at a funeral with several of the chatting mourners gossiping about petty matters and occasionally describing, in abrupt asides, when and how they’re going to die — whether in their sleep, by suicide or in a homicide. Then we hear from the dead man (Barlow, who gives a convincing performance, particularly in the ending), in a breathless existential monologue about life and death. The last scene, a solemn yet matter-of-fact couple of minutes of pure realism, is performed in total silence.As with “Hot Fudge,” this play seems at first to pull us toward the mourners, and their fascinating moments of prophecy, but quickly disposes of them. Cheryl Faraone, who directs both Churchill plays, tackles them with an even hand, though the tone and pacing could do a better job of helping to steer us to an understanding of each play’s priorities. As presented, it is hard to discern which moments and characters should most grab our attention. And Churchill’s overlapping dialogue could be smoothed out in some of the production’s choppier moments. (Under tighter direction it can move in a satisfying rhythm of interrupted sentences, outbursts and exclamations.)This production of short plays, which runs just under two hours, has hints of the remarkable among the more conventional moments. PTP/NYC (celebrating its 35th repertory season) goes for understatement here, aided by Mark Evancho’s minimal staging (one large projector screen; a bench and a lamppost in “Lunch”; and three smaller vertically hung projector screens, some stools and chairs for “Hot Fudge” and “Here We Go,” all on a stage roughly the size of a small New York City apartment living room).Still, the text could be enlivened, even challenged, with more forceful direction. A night of sensual play, manipulation, machinations and tragedy courtesy of two fiery playwrights like Berkoff and Churchill should never leave a room as cool as it does here.Sex, Grift and DeathThrough July 31 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; ptpnyc.org. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. More

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      Review: In Clare Barron’s ‘Shhhh,’ Staging a Memoir of the Body

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      The playwright directs and stars in her new play for Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2. It’s less a traditional narrative and more of a series of flirtations with discomfort.To get to your seat, you walk past someone’s toilet, stationed next to their sink, above which their pill bottles sit on a shelf.It’s hard to get more intimate than that.And yet that’s exactly what “Shhhh” manages to do. The new play, written by, directed by and starring Clare Barron, is explicit and occasionally uncomfortable, but all for the right reasons.Arnulfo Maldonado’s exquisite set design for the show, which opened on Monday at Atlantic Theater Company’s Stage 2, truly makes the space feel as if it were an apartment transformed into a theater rather than the reverse. There’s that bathroom stage left. And in a corner, partially obscured by a wall, a mattress lies on the floor, the sheets tousled on top. Candles and hanging string lights create a seductive atmosphere, but the industrial-looking metal rolling carts add a cool edge. And the audience members in the first few rows sit on cushions on the floor, extending the cozy vibe.“Shhhh” begins with Sally (named Witchy Witch in the program, and performed by Constance Shulman) recording an ASMR meditation. The sound of it is unsettling. Shulman’s signature rasp seems to envelop the space as she narrates what she’s doing — she talks about the Lysol wipe she’s using as we hear the sound of the cloth moving, amplified by a mic, and she taps her nails against a ceramic cup, telling us it’s full of lavender tea. She speaks slowly, stretching the syllables of each word so far they could reach from the theater, in Chelsea, to the East River. (The sharp sound design is by Sinan Refik Zafar.)Sally, a postal worker, says her job makes her feel close to people, even though that intimacy isn’t real. She goes on a so-so date with Penny (Janice Amaya), a nonbinary person who shares that they feel most comfortable and in control of their body during sex parties.Sally’s sister is Shareen (Barron), a playwright with a lot of “health stuff” who has a codependent and often consensually iffy sexual relationship with a male friend, Kyle (Greg Keller).And Francis (Nina Grollman) and Sandra (Annie Fang) are, well, two random young women who talk about body agency and consent in a pizza shop as Shareen, sitting at another table, silently listens.Barron and Greg Keller in the play. Arnulfo Maldonado did the set design.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Shhhh!” doesn’t have a traditional narrative; there’s no antagonist, and there’s not much of a sense of causality across scenes. The work itself has the feel of a series of flirtations: discomfort, assaults, insecurities and sorrows are spoken about and alluded to, but not detailed. We don’t get back stories or explainers. We just get the way these people speak and move and touch in relationship to one another. It’s telling that most of the sex acts mentioned are ones of penetration and discharge but much less often about the simple delicacies of a caress, or a kiss.The conversations these characters have are visceral: They talk of gushing wounds, feces-covered sheets, body fluids of all flavors. Though this shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone familiar with Barron’s works, which include “I’ll Never Love Again” and the Pulitzer Prize finalist “Dance Nation.” She’s made a specialty of writing what are essentially staged memoirs of the body. Barron rarely opts for the romantic idea of pleasure, instead examining pleasure tied to physical violence and emotional manipulation, shame, self-esteem and trauma. The whole production aches with an unspoken loneliness.That ache comes through in Barron’s direction, but also in the performances, led by Barron herself, who sheaths Shareen in a delicate melancholy. Her gaze seems to drift off into the distance serenely but without satisfaction. She seems unsteady. And yet her somberness also belies a ferocious hunger; throughout the show Shareen plays with her food, pressing her fingertips into the scraps, crumbs and flakes on her plate or table and bringing them to her mouth, almost compulsively. The characters move self-consciously — in the way they recline or cross their legs — and seem to traverse the distances that separate them cautiously, as if wading through a river to the other shore.Keller is believable as the guy friend who soon realizes he may have to hold himself accountable for some questionable bedroom behaviors, and Grollman, Fang and Amaya, who get to wear the show’s most eclectic fashions (the satisfyingly offbeat costume design is by Kaye Voyce), give top-tier performances in small roles. Shulman is less convincing as Shareen’s older sister, supposedly by only two years, despite the nearly 30-year age gap between the two actresses. Shulman’s monotone drawl is a comic novelty at first, helping many of the jokes land, but this delivery, dry as a dust storm in the desert, becomes tiresome.Nina Grollman, left, and Annie Fang in a powerful scene at a pizza shop.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe other issue is the show’s erratic pacing. A Looney Tunes-esque chase scene and a mystical ritual both feel interminable. While other scenes are too short, and characters lack depth. Amaya has a sparky energy, but their character is less developed in relation to the others. And the characters of Francis and Sandra speak in only one scene, in the pizza shop, though the dialogue is incredibly compelling: candid exchanges about what it’s like to be a woman in a world of modern dating, and romantic metaphors about isolation and desire. I could’ve watched an entire show of this conversation.I went into this show expecting the grotesque and perhaps even the gratuitous, especially once I passed a sign in the theater warning the audience about the nudity and the play’s content. Nothing triggered me or offended me, not even Shareen’s description of her diarrhea or the sight of a used DivaCup. (I can’t say the same for everyone else, particularly the three audience members who shuffled out early in the show, never to return.)But then there was one moment that got to me, when Francis and Sandra are talking about the ways the men they’ve dated have manipulated their way to getting what they want, like unprotected sex. As Francis recounted a drunken negotiation she had with a guy, my body stiffened. The exchange was so familiar; it made me recall my own sticky encounter with a date.While that moment in the show may have made me feel uncomfortable, I was also grateful for the scene, and even the thorny feeling it inspired — theater should sometimes cause us discomfort. After all, the greatest intimacies we can hope for, as audience members, are those we build between our seats and the stage.ShhhhThrough Feb. 20 at Atlantic Stage 2, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More