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    Review: In ‘Exception to the Rule,’ Detention Is Sinister

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    Teenagers bond after school in a sort of classroom purgatory. And, where is the teacher?Detention is a drag. For the students in “Exception to the Rule,” it’s also emblematic. Whatever landed them in the after-school slammer, these teenagers were already trapped by forces far beyond their control.They barrel in one after another, their voices ricocheting around the Black Box Theater, where the Roundabout Underground production opened on Wednesday night. In a space no bigger than a classroom, the audience, sitting on three sides, is spitball distance from the bickering, the posturing and revelations of what lies beneath.There’s Mikayla (Amandla Jahava), who balks at her reputation as a bad girl while relishing the attention; the goofball Tommy (Malik Childs), who claims he’s “not tryna holla” at Mikayla while very obviously taking his shot; Abdul (Mister Fitzgerald), who appears guarded and pensive, preferring to keep his head down; Dayrin (Toney Goins), who is quick-tempered but eager for a laugh; and the sweet but tart Dasani (Claudia Logan), whom Dayrin mockingly calls Aquafina (as in the other bottled water brand).Then there’s Erika (MaYaa Boateng), otherwise known as “college-bound Erika,” whose late entrance comes as a shock to the bunch. Upwardly mobile and buttoned-up, she’s what Dayrin calls “the whitest person in a room full of Black people.” What could she have done wrong? And where is the teacher, anyway? They can’t go home until he signs them out.As for the show’s conceit, the playwright, Dave Harris, borrows from both “Waiting for Godot” and John Hughes’s classic portrait of detained and misunderstood youth, “The Breakfast Club.” It’s doubtful that the students’ savior will ever come, and discovering what they’re in for, and what that says about their stations in life, propels the story forward. Throw in a few romantic sparks between opposites, and it’s all a bit too familiar.But what appears at first like a mundane exercise in remedial discipline sours into something more sinister. The P.A. system starts to glitch, no one can tell the time, and bars slide over the window as the school goes into after-hours lockdown (sound is by Lee Kinney). Take away the desks, and the scuffed floors and cinder-block walls could just as easily be the setting of a prison (the set is by Reid Thompson and Kamil James). And the flicker of fluorescents and red glow of the hall suggest a kind of purgatory (lighting is by Cha See).As the kids clash and open up to one another, surreal elements creep up, appearing to represent the systems and obstacles — poverty, redlining, over policing — that can entrap many Black people in rooms like this, and worse. And the students’ back stories illustrate how they try to maneuver against such repression: Dasani has stolen food because she’s hungry; Mikayla made her own too-short skirt out of necessity. (“You think I got money for all that extra fabric? I look sexy on a budget.”)Under the direction of Miranda Haymon, the performances have an exaggerated quality that keeps the characters at a distance, despite the action being in your face. Each one has subtler, more grounded moments, but there’s a heightened sense to their personas that hints they’re stand-ins for broader ideas. Even as the even-keeled Erika, Boateng has an almost mechanical, doll-like carriage that evokes the concept of what it takes to escape social constraints rather than someone with one foot out the door.As in his previous work “Tambo & Bones,” Harris toys with stereotypes about Blackness in order to turn them inside out, pointing to the history, circumstances and motivations behind ways of thinking and behavior. It’s an exercise performed for the benefit of audiences presumed to be in need of instruction, and for some it will no doubt be an eye-opening lesson.But there’s a restlessness inherent to every schoolroom timeout, and to theatergoers being positioned as pupils. What happens once we can see people for who they are and then dig deeper into their contradictions? Understanding how lives are shaped by their limitations, as Harris details here with an ultimately pat sort of logic, is foundational to social justice. But in order to see that there’s more to people than what keeps them in margins, first we may have to set them free.Exception to the RuleThrough June 26 at the Black Box Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      When Theater Installations Aim to Make Room for Drama

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      These worthy and adventurous lockdown experiments too often give short shrift to the relationship between a script and how an audience takes it in.For the last year and a half, I’ve imagined shuttered theaters as shrines to live performance — the empty seats, the leftover sets, the lone ghost lights lit like memorial candles.While performances eventually moved online and outside, and in the last few months, thanks to mask mandates and vaccines, back inside, some companies and artists have chosen a different route: offering theater-adjacent installations that allow audiences to engage more directly with the spaces.In these shows, we are often asked to walk through the venues and explore, freely or with the help of a guide, not merely sit and watch. And with small clusters of bodies in motion, they may be (or at least feel) safer than the typical experience of being locked down in your seat.Unfortunately, most of the theatrical installations I’ve seen — which include “A Dozen Dreams,” “Seven Deadly Sins,” “The Watering Hole,” and, most recently, “Definition” and “Semblance” — have struggled to successfully integrate content and location. Most of these works, which, with the exception of “Seven Deadly Sins,” did not use any live actors, were an inventive approach to theater in a time when it was unsafe to sit and gather in these spaces. But they have yet to realize the full potential of these hybrid forms as more than a stopgap on the way back to pre-pandemic theater.“Semblance,” written and directed by Whitney White for New York Theater Workshop, is a set of lyrical monologues about how Black women are perceived and stereotyped. Socially distant groupings of white director’s chairs situated on an Astroturf floor in front of two colossal TV screens set side by side.On them we see Nikiya Mathis, playing Black women of different classes, from a bus driver to a politician. Her image often confronts itself, emphasizing the tension already present in the writing. And Mathis makes a feast out of these monologues, transforming her intonation and inflections. But the ultimate experience is far from immersive; in fact, it is little more than a dressed-up screening of a short film. The space is forgettable.Audience members watched videos at their own pace at Whitney White’s other recent installation, entitled “Definition.”Maya SharpeAnother White installation, “Definition,” presented by the Bushwick Starr at the performance space Mercury Store in July, had a clear understanding of its space but couldn’t make it cohere with the piece’s myriad elements. The first portion was designed like a museum; the stark white walls and starkly modern architecture of the space lent themselves to the curated selection of paintings and photographs that hung on the walls.Likewise, a selection of short videos by a handful of artists, which played on a projection screen on a mezzanine level that opened up to a bleacher-like flight of stairs, were comfortably showcased. This part of the production had a free-floating style; the audience members were left to wander at will, and were free to sit and watch the videos but could also stand or continue to browse.Guides then appeared, leading us to a room where we were given headphones. The rest of the experience, an audio-only musical with each act taking place in a separate designated space, lacked clarity. Gauzy curtains divided up the theater, but there was little to distinguish each subspace beyond the different seating arrangements.To lead an audience through a space should be to create a new narrative out of that movement: How do we change in moving from one room to another? How does our understanding of the text change? What do we see differently in one room that another couldn’t offer?One of the structures created for “A Dozen Dreams” at Brookfield Place.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe beauty of En Garde Arts’s “A Dozen Dreams,” a sumptuously designed installation of 12 rooms that served as stages for audio monologues by female playwrights, was that each location had its own identity. The labyrinthine setup at Brookfield Place, with interlinked rooms divided by curtains, recalled the odd way we move through dreams — stories bleed into one another, scenes change suddenly. The experience of venturing from one piece to the next was essential.But even with such a luscious experience, I questioned the installation’s awkward relationship with Brookfield, a high-end mall. Mundanely expensive shops were juxtaposed with a uniquely surreal visual journey — art placed in a home for consumerism. Surely there’s a disconnect there?Similarly, “Seven Deadly Sins,” performed in empty storefronts in the meatpacking district, was an eye-catching spectacle but didn’t fully connect the text to the environs.The neighborhood’s history (slaughterhouses and sex clubs, and now pricey shops) was ostensibly reflected in seven short plays that focused on the vices of its title. But mostly we got guides mentioning tidbits about the neighborhood in passing, as they led the audience from one storefront to another.Audience members write notes as part of the Signature Theater’s “The Watering Hole.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA lost sense of communal gathering was one of the themes of the installation “The Watering Hole,” a mixed-media project created and conceived by Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon that ran at the Pershing Square Signature Center last month. Seventeen artists collaborated with Nottage and Haymon on the installation, which lacked coherency. Piles of sand and deflated beach balls in one corner, handwritten signs on the walls: this disjointed odyssey did no justice to the space as a watering hole for thought or a beloved home for several theaters. Even with talented creators, the magic of a theater can be flattened by a misuse of space.The irony is that I fondly remember the Signature Center as a safe haven. In my busy pre-pandemic days I knew I could take a break in the second floor cafe. I’ve waited there between a Saturday matinee and an evening show. I’ve ducked in to get out of the rain.These moments — along with what appeared on the Signature’s stages — were stolen away by the pandemic.Installations have offered reasonable ways to keep theater going during the pandemic. But they can’t just be backdrops. Real theater needs a space to breathe.SemblanceThrough Aug. 29 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 55 minutes. More

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      Review: ‘The Watering Hole’ Can’t Quite Quench a Thirst

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      The collaborative project conceived by Lynn Nottage is too heterogeneous and muddled to rally around one clear theme or concept.The day I went to the Signature Theater it was so hellishly hot out that it felt as if the air was clinging to my skin. So I stepped into the air-conditioned coolness of the Pershing Square Signature Center for “The Watering Hole,” a theatrical installation conceived and curated by the Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage and Miranda Haymon. What I’d hoped for was refreshment. What I left with was a thirst for a more memorable and neatly composed offering.“The Watering Hole,” directed by Haymon, is a collaborative project featuring work by Haymon and Nottage along with Christina Anderson, Matt Barbot, Montana Levi Blanco, Stefania Bulbarella, Amith Chandrashaker, nicHi douglas, Iyvon E., Justin Ellington, Emmie Finckel, Vanessa German, Ryan J. Haddad, Phillip Howze, Haruna Lee, Campbell Silverstein, Charly Evon Simpson and Rhiana Yazzie. For each 80-minute show, a small audience is split into two groups and led through the lobby, dressing rooms, theaters and backstage areas, where they encounter sculptures, audiovisual installations and interactive activities.Part of the conceit, after all, is locating the theater as a gathering space — a place for collaboration. At least I think it is. The production is too heterogeneous and muddled to rally around one clear theme or concept.The grand staircase of the Signature Center is the first stop. The whole space is outlined with sea-blue walking paths and water drop stickers marking where to stand at a safe social distance. Audio interviews from the artists, in which most of them talk about ancestry, play through speakers. So this show is about heritage and ancestry? Well, no. Because there’s all of the water, like a video of Haddad in which he talks about how he, as a disabled man, learned how to swim. So perhaps it’s about independence and resiliency? Then what about German and Lee’s original song, “This Room Is a Broken Heart,” which plays on a mind-numbing loop in the lobby and talks about water as a symbol of grief? And Anderson and Haymon’s karaoke-inspired piece in a dressing room, where there’s a “Big”-style floor piano that you’re invited to use to accompany a song playing on the TV?These are the parts of the show that fly off into the theater ether, like the piece that shows a projection of a figure in a lotus pose who talks about energies, frequencies and chakras. But then this is paired with more literal meditations on water: In one part of the show, in some back hallway, there’s a corner set up for a “dance break,” with a mound of sand, blue and pink fluorescent lights and some slightly deflated beach balls. In that same hallway there’s a corkboard with beach photos and water-themed poems by Langston Hughes, Lucille Clifton, Ada Limón and Natalie Shapero, among others.The most traditional theater piece, “Spray Cap” (created by Barbot and Chandrashaker with Colon-Zayas), a monologue about yearning to come together and celebrate summer after a time of pandemic and isolation, is also the strongest. It’s not just the straightforward approach but the cohesion of it — the clarity of voice and themes, and the clear tie to the installation at large — that highlights what the rest of the production lacks. Even the set design — a stage with two park benches and some crates arranged around a giant hydrant that puffs out steam — fits perfectly with the speaker’s desire for everyone to “come out” and let themselves go in the brutal heat of a summer when people can finally meet up and touch.“Spray Cap” has one of the few designs that actually work in the installation, unlike the handwritten notes and scrolls with words and reflections taped on the walls throughout the complex. Haddad’s video is played in a dark room with a ceiling that projects water scenes and a reflective floor that matches the same cool blue of the pool. And one of three lobby sailboat sculptures — an ornate medley of trinkets and knickknacks like bird figurines, shells and water bottles, along with a white baby piano — is a stunning visual work by German and Lee.But all this still fails to illuminate the upshot. Because “The Watering Hole” also seems to have an interest in a kind of community service. Nottage has said that the “inspiration and organizing principle” of the project came from a collaborative reflection on the Signature as a meeting place. And so one part of the show invites the audience to write on little “sails” what makes them feel safe and add them to a boat in the lobby. And another boat in the lobby holds postcards that audience members are prompted to fill out and write to incarcerated people. Though well-intentioned, it’s hard to find the connective tissue here or, as Nottage says, the organizing principle.Whatever “The Watering Hole” means to express, it’s drowned in this sea of artists.The Watering HoleThrough Aug. 8 Pershing Square Signature Center, Manhattan; 212-244-7529, signaturetheatre.org. More