Review: What’s Past Is Prologue in ‘While You Were Partying’
This maddening, brain-scrambling show, which just opened at the esteemed Soho Rep, is nothing if not slippery, our critic writes.You wonder what’s real and what’s made up, what’s meant to be funny and what’s meant to be tragic during “While You Were Partying,” especially during a scene involving an accident. A character named Brian whips himself into a frenzy, goaded by his mother, and something unexpected happens. Or looks like it does.It’s certainly convincing enough, especially since shortly after that episode Brian frantically hurls himself at the walls, leaving the actor portraying him, Brian Fiddyment, beet-red, his face looking genuinely banged up. Is make-believe supposed to be painful? Where does the commitment to the authenticity of storytelling begin and end? This maddening, brain-scrambling show, which just opened at the esteemed Soho Rep, is nothing if not slippery.Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey, who wrote “While You Were Partying” with Fiddyment, are fascinated by the intersection of autobiography and fiction, and they scratch at it as if it were a scab. The pair investigate our culture’s narcissism and manipulative streak, its hazy relationship with truth and facts in a deeply unsettling way.Their masterful production “50/50 [old school animation]” (presented at the 2019 Under the Radar festival) was made up of two seemingly straightforward monologues and hit like a horror story. In the work-in-progress “Protec/Attac,” which the Brick Theater streamed on YouTube in March, Weiss asked Mounsey questions as they sat across from each other at a table, both of them speaking in a studiously blank, neutral tone that slowly made their conversation sound disturbing. (In addition to its in-person performances, “While You Were Partying” will livestream on Twitch Nov. 14 and 21.)The new piece, which is named after a meme that starts with “While you were partying, I studied the blade,” simultaneously embraces the confessional mode and demolishes it, all the while making us question the very nature of comedy.Brian’s paroxystic unraveling has been set up by a prologue from his childhood friend Julia (Mounsey). “It’s a true story,” she says. “About something that I did.” She also informs us that she has problems with the truth when telling people what happened: “I exaggerate certain parts and omit others.”Julia lost her job and her apartment in the pandemic, and moved back to her parents’ house to regroup. She learns that Brian had tried to kill himself a few weeks earlier. This she does not tell us directly: Julia never speaks live but plays a phone recording of herself. As we listen, she sits, staring. Her lips are slightly upturned in what convention might describe as a smile, albeit one that feels feral, dangerous.Julia introduces the rest of the play, which she says she wrote as an assignment from Brian: “You should write a comedy sketch about my suicide attempt,” he told her.Some audience members at last Saturday’s performance laughed loudly, in a way that felt performative, during Julia’s so-called sketch, especially when Weiss turns up as Brian’s mother and grills him in that same blank tone. Would those theatergoers have reacted the same way if the scene hadn’t been presented as funny? Were they trying to prove to themselves and the rest of us that they got it, whatever “it” was?“While You Were Partying” does not offer answers. It burrows under the skin like a parasite. There has not been a day since I saw this show when I did not think about it.While You Were PartyingThrough Nov. 28 at the SoHo Repertory Theater, Manhattan; 646-586-8982, sohorep.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More
