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      Review: ‘Public Obscenities’ Pushes Far Beyond One Field of Study

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      The new work from Shayok Misha Chowdhury creates a strong enough center for the rest of its disparate parts to hold, and leaves the audience craving more.It is a testament to Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s gifts as a writer that he is able to evoke as many themes, histories and possibilities as he does in “Public Obscenities,” and leave his audience not dazed or frustrated, but longing for even more. Truthfully, the work might best unfold as a mini-series, a longer medium where his interests can find proper room to breathe.Running just under three hours, the play’s premiere production at Soho Rep, in Lower Manhattan, is both too long for one cohesive sitting, even with an intermission, and too short to tidy up all the threads at which it pulls. But, co-presented by the National Asian American Theater Company and directed by Chowdhury with a swooning hypnotism reminiscent of the best works of neorealism, it creates a strong enough center for the rest of its disparate parts to hold.To be fair, Chowdhury winks at the impossibility of successfully wrapping up all his concerns in a terrific quip from Choton (Abrar Haque), a Bengali American student who had returned to his native Kolkata, India, for a vaguely defined academic project. At the Ph.D. level, he explains, fields of study — English, anthropology, performance, gender, cinema — all start to look and feel the same.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.Along with his non-Bangla-speaking cinematographer boyfriend, Raheem (Jakeem Dante Powell), Choton hopes to interview queer locals found on the hookup app Grindr. To what end, exactly, is uncertain, but it does allow Chowdhury to explore the difficulties of mixing business, pleasure and personal experience in the precarious quest to analyze subcultures defined by their marginalization. Their own relationship dynamic is called into question as Choton and Raheem set up a joint Grindr account, and Haque and Powell navigate these burdensome complexities with touching humanity and intelligence.Their study also provides an excuse for a scene-stealing interview subject to come into the picture, played by the transgender activist Tashnuva Anan with a liveliness and self-assurance made for public adoration. Anan’s character, Shou, identifies as kothi, a native Indian gender similar to an effeminate man and, through Shou, Choton confronts his feeling of alienation from his compatriots’ queer scene.Apart from a later foray into a nearby river, he does this from his late grandfather’s house, now kept by his aunt (Gargi Mukherjee), her online billiards-addicted husband (Debashis Roy Chowdhury) and their housekeeper (Golam Sarwar Harun). With their colorful side stories and performances, these three build out a world unconnected to the young couple’s mission, which is also thrown off-balance through the discovery of an undeveloped film reel inside the deceased patriarch’s camera.This abundance of plot (is it too late to mention Shou’s street-smart friend, played by NaFis?) should come closer to overwhelming the production, but Chowdhury’s cinematic direction — aided by title credits screened onstage by Johnny Moreno (who also turns the space into a serene riverbank), Barbara Samuels’s transitional lighting and Tei Blow’s inventive sound design — keep things steadily afloat. And the sunny one-room set, by dots, a scenic-design collective, is ravishing in its simplicity and use of soft canary yellow (and burning incense).This expansive production casts a wide net, yes, but one kept from being spread too thin by a uniformly excellent cast and the deliberate pacing of a confident playwright. Chowdhury also accomplishes the not-insignificant task of successfully writing a bilingual play, with some of the Bangla dialogue translated via supertitles and some left to nonspeakers’ imagination.If the play ends with some unfortunately unanswered questions, its conclusion is a hopeful, not frustrating, one. Chowdhury is a writer with great promise who, with “Public Obscenities,” may have found himself on the brink of greatness.Public ObscenitiesThrough March 26 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 2 hours and 50 minutes. More

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      ‘Montag’ Review: A Dark Hymn to Female Friendship

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      Not quite a comedy and not quite a thriller, Kate Tarker’s play is an antic study of two women preparing for a game (or possibly an attack).In a basement apartment somewhere in Germany, Faith (Ariana Venturi) chain smokes cigarettes and drinks endless cups of coffee. Novella (Nadine Malouf) chomps her way through a bag of spicy chips. They argue, they dance, they try on clubwear, they play anxious games. Like lots of characters in lots of plays before them, they are waiting. But not for God or liberation or even a gentleman caller, not exactly. They are waiting for the man who is coming to kill them.This is the trap laid by Kate Tarker’s antic, frantic “Montag,” at Soho Rep, directed by Dustin Wills. Not quite a comedy and not quite a tragedy, sometimes a thriller and often something more bizarre, the play is a hymn to female friendship and, in harsher music, a study of the threat of intimate partner violence. No place, the show intimates, is safe. Not the kitchen table, not the stage.It takes time to figure all of this out, which may signal confidence in the audience on the part of Wills and Tarker, or brash unconcern. Lisa Laratta’s set, a box inside Soho Rep’s already petite stage, is an abstract rendering of a living room; Masha Tsimring’s lights suggest a perpetual midnight. Details about where we are and when we are and the contours of the women’s relationship are kept similarly shadowed. It’s exciting, in a way, this theater as jigsaw, and there’s satisfaction as each piece snaps together. But the murk of these early scenes can also feel like feints until the rules of the game come clear. Or nearly clear. Are these women’s sports and rehearsals preparations to meet death or to cheat it?There’s a realistic drama lurking inside “Montag,” a story of how a Turkish sex worker and an American military operative became friends, how they moved in together, whether this caused any ructions back on the base. That’s a drama I wouldn’t mind seeing, and it might have more geopolitical resonance, which this version gestures toward and then dismisses. But Tarker doesn’t trust that story, or she dreams bigger and weirder. Both, maybe. (The German setting, Novella’s job and the murderous inclinations of her common-law husband also indicate a dialogue with Büchner’s “Woyzeck,” a classic of German proto-expressionism.)Certainly “Montag” is more tethered to reality than Tarker’s previous play, the Alfred Jarry-ish farce “Thunderbodies.” Yet only in its late moments, when the two-character piece expands, careening into operatic hallucination, does it take on weight. The play makes sense as dreams make sense. When life feels like a nightmare, Wills’s production suggests, it should move like a nightmare, too.Malouf, always a welcome presence, infuses Novella with an unvarnished sensuality and a party-at-the-end-of-the-world abandon, born of having nothing left to lose. Novella can seem indolent, unconcerned, until she begins to scream. Venturi’s Faith holds herself more tightly, a jittery presence still trying to juggle odds, plans and probabilities even when logic has clearly failed. The less said about the characters played by Jacob Orr and Dane Suarez, an operatic tenor, the better, though they are played finely.If “Montag” conveys a stylistic restlessness, that puts it in good company. Two weeks ago, Sarah Benson, an artistic director of Soho Rep for the past 15 years, announced that she would step down at the close of this current season. Meropi Peponides, at Soho Rep since 2014, will depart as well. Under Benson’s tenure, the company has continued as a home for formal experimentation and audacious swings. In “Montag,” not all of those swings connect. But how wonderful that Soho Rep has made a space where artists can take them.MontagThrough Nov. 13 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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      Two Soho Rep Directors to Leave at End of 2022-23 Season

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      Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, who have directed the company with Cynthia Flowers since 2019, will depart to focus more on their own creative output.Soho Rep, the 65-seat Off Off Broadway theater in Lower Manhattan that has long been a home for experimental, formally inventive work, will see a leadership change as Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, two of its three directors, step down at the end of the 2022-23 season.Both Benson and Peponides, who have led the theater alongside Cynthia Flowers since a shared directorship was put into place in 2019, said they were leaving Soho Rep in part to focus more on their own creative work. Benson said she wanted to do more directing, while Peponides said she planned to dedicate more time to Radical Evolution, a producing collective she co-founded in 2011 that focuses on exploring the complexities of the mixed-identity existence.“It came time to make a choice about where to devote my time and energy,” Peponides said. “Doing both was becoming trickier and trickier.”A search committee, led by Soho Rep’s board chair, Victoria Meakin, and the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, has been formed to appoint two new directors, Soho Rep said. Peponides and Benson will remain in their roles through the end of the season next summer.Benson, 44, has been with the theater for 15 years, serving as artistic director from 2007 until 2019, when Soho Rep adopted the shared leadership model. During her tenure, she directed the world premieres of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s searing comedy-drama “Fairview,” a co-commission by Soho Rep that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Jacobs-Jenkins’s formally inventive comedy “An Octoroon”; and Lucas Hnath’s black comedy “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney.”Peponides, 38, started at the theater as a producer in 2014, producing 18 new plays over her eight years and overseeing Soho Rep’s writer-director lab that is led by the playwrights William Burke and Drury.Under Benson, Peponides and Flowers’s leadership, Soho Rep has worked to improve pay equity through Project Number One, a job creation program developed early in the pandemic that brings artists into the organization each season as salaried staff members with benefits. Two of the three plays in the theater’s 2022-23 season, “Public Obscenities” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury and “The Whitney Album” by Jillian Walker, were written by artists who were in the first class of Project Number One.“We had three world premiere commissions in this year’s season,” Peponides said. “A huge part of the work Sarah and I have been seeding over the past several years is now coming to fruition, so this felt like the moment to step aside and hand it over while it was in great shape.” More

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      New Soho Rep Season Spotlights Emerging Artists

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      A Bengali-English play and a meditation on the work of Whitney Houston are among the offerings.Soho Rep, a 65-seat Off Off Broadway theater in Lower Manhattan, has always been a home for experimental, formally inventive work. But a play in its new season is beyond anything one of the company’s three directors, Meropi Peponides, ever thought it would be able to support: A Bengali-English play.“I couldn’t have imagined in my wildest dreams when I started working at Soho Rep that that would be something we would ever be able to produce,” Peponides said. “It’s so exciting to be able to represent the experiences of South Asian Americans in the diaspora.”The play, “Public Obscenities” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury, is part of the theater’s 2022-23 season, which is set to run from October to July 2023. There will be three world premieres, two of which were written by artists who were members of the first class of the theater’s pandemic-era job creation initiative, Project Number One.The premieres “are emblematic of what Soho Rep does,” said Peponides, who directs the theater alongside Sarah Benson and Cynthia Flowers. “We commit to an idea when it’s still an idea and develop it all the way through to production.”First up is Kate Tarker’s “Montag” (Oct. 12-Nov. 13), a play about female friendship set in a basement apartment in a small German town near an American military base. The production, which is set to be directed by Dustin Wills (“Wolf Play”), is described as a “domestic thriller, a sleep-deprivation comedy and a rebellion celebration under threat of annihilation.”It will be followed by Chowdhury’s bilingual “Public Obscenities” (Feb. 15-March 26, 2023), which originated during his time as a member of Project Number One. The production is a co-commission and coproduction with the National Asian American Theater Company’s National Partnership Project. It tells the story of a queer studies doctoral student who returns to his family home in Kolkata, India, with his Black American boyfriend and makes an unexpected discovery. Chowdhury will also direct.Closing out the season is “The Whitney Album” (May 24-July 2, 2023). The play, by Jillian Walker (who also participated in Project Number One), explores Walker’s relationship to the life and death of Whitney Houston, as well as perceptions of her in the American imagination. Jenny Koons directs.And Project Number One returns, with its third class, this time with the stylist and costume designer Hahnji Jang and the lighting designer Kate McGee. The initiative brings artists into the organization as salaried staff members ($1,250 per week) with benefits, including a year of health insurance coverage and a $10,000 budget to create a new work. More

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      Asked to Adapt a Classic Play, This Writer Rethought Her Life

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      As she sought the truth for her characters on the page, Mara Vélez Meléndez’s real self began to emerge. Now she’s making her Off Broadway debut.In 2018, as part of a masters program in playwriting at Hunter College in Manhattan, Mara Vélez Meléndez was given a life-changing assignment: adapt a classic play. She chose “John Gabriel Borkman,” a rarely revived late Ibsen play about an ambitious banker, and in her reworking, the characters became members of the Financial Oversight and Management Board for Puerto Rico, created in 2016 by the U.S. federal government to resolve the island’s debt crisis.The resulting work, “Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members,” recently opened at Soho Rep in Manhattan. But when Vélez Meléndez, now 29, embarked on the project, she knew little about the board, or “la junta” as it’s known colloquially in her native Puerto Rico, other than that a large percentage of the population was against its unelected power to oversee the island’s budget.Working against the clock — “I had one week until the deadline,” she recalled — the playwright hit a wall. No amount of research helped her understand who the board members were or why they were appointed by the Obama administration. The board’s mission — to put the island on a path to sustainable economic growth — has led to fiscal austerity and criticism that it has taken away the island’s sovereignty, effectively creating a modern colonialism.“Puerto Rico es la isla que se repite (is the repeating island),” Vélez Meléndez said, alluding to the Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo and his seminal reflection on the interminable colonial impositions laid upon Caribbean islands since Columbus’s arrival. “We’re always going back to the same thing,” she added.Christine Carmela, left, as Lolita and Samora la Perdida, who plays outlandish versions of the board members.Julieta CervantesIntrigued by the lack of information on the board members, Vélez Meléndez wrote a play that employs what she called a queer lens to investigate how “Puerto Rico was turned into a neoliberal playground.” (The play, a coproduction of Soho Rep and the Sol Project, is running through June 19.)Every trace of Ibsen disappeared in the process. It’s all Vélez Meléndez now. The play takes place in the office reception of “la junta,” a liminal space that conveys the timeless vacuousness of bureaucratic hellscapes. Lolita (Christine Carmela), a trans woman, arrives with one mission: “to decolonize the island of Puerto Rico.”On Being Transgender in AmericaPhalloplasty: The surgery, used to construct a penis, has grown more popular among transgender men. But with a steep rate of complications, it remains a controversial procedure.Elite Sports: The case of the transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has stirred a debate about the nature of athleticism in women’s sports.Transgender Youth: A photographer documented the lives of transgender youth. She shared some thoughts on what she saw.Corporate World: What is it like to transition while working for Wall Street? A Goldman Sachs’ employee shares her experience.Throughout the play, Lolita meets various characters, including a Nuyorican receptionist whose gender identity is unresolved and outlandish versions of board members (all played by Samora la Perdida). They not only fail to take Lolita seriously but try to convince her that they know more about her needs than she does.The playwright realized in trying to decolonize Puerto Rico, she was also learning how to decolonize gender identity, including her own. When she started writing the play, Vélez Meléndez had not yet begun to transition and identified as “cis, queer, question mark,” believing she didn’t have the right label to give herself.“I’m a political writer whose plays aren’t about politics,” Vélez Meléndez said.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesGrowing up in Puerto Rico, she had learned that being queer meant she had to like men, “but I never wanted to be around them,” she says laughing. She began writing for pleasure while pursuing a double major in journalism and theater at the University of Puerto Rico. “I wasn’t dating and really didn’t like sports,” she explained, so she found solace and unexpected joy in the works of Beckett and Ionesco.This in turn led to an interest in modern theater, including works like “An Octoroon” by her future Hunter professor Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. One of her mentors, the Puerto Rican playwright and performer Sylvia Bofill, suggested she should write her own plays.Upon moving to New York City for grad school in 2017, Vélez Meléndez found that gay and transgender people were everywhere. “There were trans girls on the subway, lesbian couples holding hands in the street, everything felt like a possibility,” she said. Soon, she added, she found a safe space among fellow theater-makers and new friends who allowed her to experiment with her gender expression in ways that would have seemed forbidden in Puerto Rico. Once she sat down to write, her sister had begun transitioning, and Vélez Meléndez wanted to include a trans character as a homage.Originally, it wasn’t Lolita who was trans but the receptionist character. Lolita is inspired by the real-life Puerto Rican nationalist Lolita Lebrón, who, in 1954, led an attack in the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in the wounding of several members of Congress. Writing scenes in which Lolita talks to the receptionist about decolonization made the playwright feel horrible.“It’s the TERF-iest I’ve ever been with myself,” she explained, using an acronym for “trans exclusionary radical feminists,” a term used to describe feminists who are transphobic. “Here I was telling this trans character they have to decolonize themselves when they had done it years ago.”Dissatisfied with the draft she presented at Hunter, Vélez Meléndez said she was shocked by the encouragement she received from her classmates and professor. Jacobs-Jenkins then introduced her to the director David Mendizábal, overseeing the Soho Rep production, who helped the play take a turn by asking, “what if it was Lolita who was trans instead?”Suddenly, as Vélez Meléndez was able to identify more with her lead character and her pleas, the play took on a life of its own. “It was a beautiful journey to witness,” Mendizábal said, “the truth of these two characters emerged on the page as she was emerging more and more in real life.” It was around this time that Soho Rep first showed interest in producing the play, but then the pandemic happened.This forced period of isolation allowed the young playwright to open up her spectrum of presentation. She started wearing more dresses and skirts, fully shaved her facial hair for the first time since high school, and when she tried on a crop top, she realized she looked like the kind of girls she crushed on. “Seeing myself in one of those women I was attracted to I knew that I could love myself,” she said.One day at the post office, when a clerk referred to her as “ma’am” everything clicked. “It kept clicking through the play,” she explained, recalling the effect this had on Lolita’s agency as well. Last July, she came out to her partner by saying, “I’m not trying to copy my sister, but I think this is happening.”“This was a case where the play was just writing itself. I was writing it, writing me, writing itself,” she added.With the newfound confidence she discovered during her transition, as well as the joy and elation of making her Off Broadway debut, Vélez Meléndez is looking forward to spending her summer working on a batch of new plays. “I’m going to write about my experience as a trans girl from the diaspora,” she explained. “I’m a political writer whose plays aren’t about politics.”Although she didn’t uncover much about how the oversight board works, writing “Notes on a Killing” allowed Vélez Meléndez to realize “there are many things we need to decolonize within ourselves before we actually get to start the country we dreamed of.” That in itself feels like the ultimate kind of political awakening, a revolution in the making. More

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      ‘Notes on Killing’ Review: For These Puerto Ricans, Promises Never Kept

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      Mara Vélez Meléndez’s “Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members” ferociously explores the intersection of the personal and the political.“Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members,” a hot and bothered new play by Mara Vélez Meléndez, is a psychodrama with an emphasis — and I mean psycho in the nicest possible way. A coproduction of Soho Rep and the Sol Project, the show imagines a young woman with a personal mission to assassinate the bureaucrats responsible for restructuring Puerto Rico’s debt and the queer receptionist who abets her. A political allegory, a savage drag show and a folie à deux with far too much gunplay for anyone who has lived through the past week’s news, “Notes” is a trigger warning writ large and in glitter, a fever dream with streamers.For those who don’t follow Puerto Rico’s political and economic fortunes, a brief history lesson will prove useful. By 2016, Puerto Rico’s credit crisis had worsened significantly, with the island owing more than $70 billion. In a move with celebrity backing — Lin-Manuel Miranda was at the time a supporter — Congress passed the Puerto Rican Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, known as Promesa, which gave an unelected board the power to restructure the island’s debt and impose fiscal austerity. Few of that board’s members lived in Puerto Rico, which added to criticism of the act as colonialist.These circumstances have brought Lolita (Christine Carmela), a trans Puerto Rican woman, to the New York City offices of the Promesa board, with a gun in her purse. Lolita is not her real name, but she has styled herself, she tells us, after Lolita Lebrón, a Puerto Rican nationalist who participated in an armed attack on the House of Representatives in 1954. That attack wounded five members of Congress; our Lolita aims for a greater body count. Yet before she can assassinate anyone, a receptionist (Samora la Perdida) intercepts her and takes her firearm away.The receptionist doesn’t have a name and their gender identity is unresolved.“I haven’t found, haven’t been satisfied? With any word that represents myself maybe,” they say.A drag performer, the receptionist suggests that Lolita should prepare for her task by pretending to shoot a drag version of each of the seven board members. Conveniently, they have a prop gun coated in gold glitter in a handy drawer, which she can use in their playlet. The receptionist then provides a fabulous interpretation of each member — dancing and lip syncing, makeup immaculate.Demented, exuberant and appropriately angry, Vélez Meléndez’s play borrows from European absurdist theater, like the plays of Jarry and Genet, as well as a tradition of Latin American surrealism. As directed by David Mendizábal, who also designed the irrepressible costumes, the show takes place less in an office than in a shimmering theater of the mind. Is any of this real? Does that matter? Shh! They’re playing “Spice Up Your Life.”“Notes” is queer in its aesthetics, if not exactly in its form. The drag personae emerge tidily, one after the other, and the scenes take on a kind of sameness. But the play challenges Carmela and la Perdida to negotiate realism, fantasy and everything in between, a challenge they giddily accept, occasionally finding genuine poignancy even in the midst of the irrational and bizarre. And there’s delight, of course, in seeing la Perdida emerge in each new get-up. (This is likely a show in which the backstage action — the frantic donning and doffing of wig and makeup and costume — is probably just as exciting as what’s onstage.)Ultimately, Vélez Meléndez cares less about political consequence than about individual identity. Will Lolita accomplish mass murder? Maybe! Will she push the receptionist toward self-determination? Now there’s a question.The moral of “Notes,” simply stated by Lolita, is both provocation and invitation: “The journey of decolonization starts with the self!” Few of us can meaningfully affect Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis or its vexed journey toward either statehood or independence. But can we shake it, shake it, shake it, with authenticity? Can we self-govern in our private lives? “Notes” suggests that, with enough glitter, we can.Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board MembersThrough June 19 at Soho Repertory Theater, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      ‘Wolf Play’ Review: What Keeps a Family From Falling to Pieces?

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      Hansol Jung’s new play looks at the broken adoption of a little boy who is plucked from South Korea and moved to one American home, then shunted to another.Sand-colored with beady black eyes and a throaty howl, the character at the center of “Wolf Play” is and is not what he seems. Wolf, who serves as the narrator, is a simple but expressive puppet made of wood, cardboard and papier-mâché in this probing and playful exploration of family by Hansol Jung.Loose-limbed and rising just a few feet off the floor of the tiny stage at Soho Rep, Wolf represents a 6-year-old boy who undergoes one wrenching separation after another. The American couple who adopt him from South Korea decide they can’t handle him and the demands of their newborn too, so they find another family for the boy by advertising on a Yahoo message board.An abandonment so awful and absurd calls for fierce survival instincts. Perhaps that goes to explain why the boy isn’t a boy at all, but a wolf who longs for a pack, as Mitchell Winter, the adult actor maneuvering the puppet, insists.Wolves get a bad rap, Winter tells the audience, which is seated on either side of the stage. The lone ones may snatch red hoods, but they don’t make mischief for its own sake. It’s a natural response for familial creatures left to fend for themselves, crouched defensively much of the time. “But stories need conflict,” he says, “and, boy, do wolves know how to fight.”“Wolf Play,” which opened on Monday, proposes that “the truth is a wobbly thing.” In Jung’s freely associative landscape, that means allowing a puppet to be a boy, a boy to be a wolf and a wolf to be an actor in a knit cap with pointy ears (costumes are by Enver Chakartash).The play directed by Dustin Wills and presented with Ma-Yi Theatre Company, portrays a traumatic situation, but with an antic disposition and a goofy heart. How would a boy respond to these wounds but with growls, howls and swinging paws? It seems too much for one being to process, yet there’s a lightness here that chases away the shadows.Wolf, a volatile and reactive jumble of joints, is handed off by Peter (Aubie Merrylees), the father who adopted him, to Robin (Nicole Villamil) and her wife, Ash (Esco Jouléy). Robin is eager to become a mother, while Ash is a boxer prepping to go pro and reluctant to take on a distraction like a child. Ryan (Brandon Mendez Homer), who is Robin’s brother and Ash’s coach, seems supportive of the adoption — until Wolf’s position in the pack seems to threaten his own.If the play has a love plot, it’s between Wolf and Ash, a prototypical fighter with a tough exterior and soft center. Ash is nonbinary, and is the first person to whom the boy speaks out loud. “Wolf Play” suggests there’s an animality connecting us that transcends gendered social scripts; kinship and love are wild and don’t play by any rules. Peter, however, objects to the absence of a conventional father in the boy’s new home.Performances from the ensemble are uniformly strong and suited to the production’s intimate scale. Winter’s double feat as an energetic narrator and a sensitive puppeteer is so nimble that the boy often appears to be a separate living thing, endearing one moment, a terror the next (Amanda Villalobos is the puppet designer).But casting a wolf as a protagonist becomes a tricky gesture when expressing inner feelings is limited to encyclopedic facts about the species. (“Wolves are cautious, the masters of survival.” “Wolves suck at being alone.”) Though Jung’s narrator seems to promise access to the story’s emotional core, there is only so much that taxonomy can illuminate.Wills’s production has the exuberant restlessness of a crayon drawing tacked to the fridge, chaotic but underlaid with a careful internal logic. A door on wheels, mismatched chairs and blue balloons (from Wolf’s “welcome home” party) are roving fixtures of You-Shin Chen’s set. Barbara Samuels’s lighting makes prodigious use of tone and darkness, while the sound design by Kate Marvin inspires the grating quality of a child’s crying.If stories need conflicts, as Wolf suggests, the climactic ones here — a bout in the ring, the inevitable custody battle — ultimately feel manufactured and somewhat beside the point. There’s an unruly quality to Jung’s idea of what theater can be, jagged and untethered, coy and dreamlike. It’s thrilling to see that potential unleashed on the vagaries of love, even if it’s not so easily tamed.Wolf PlayThrough March 20 at Soho Rep, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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      Review: What’s Past Is Prologue in ‘While You Were Partying’

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      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