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

    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’

    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