When feeling cornered by real-world drama, I catch myself thinking that theater should stand aside from time and space, like a self-contained capsule of pure art. But a recent tour of Off and Off Off Broadway offerings is a bracing reminder of how exhilarating a show can be when it connects one person — onstage, in the audience — with the world.
Here are four plays around New York that are small (in scale and budget, not heart or ambition) and tackle political issues in imaginative ways.
‘KS6: Small Forward’
This is a show by the defiantly activist Belarus Free Theater, whose artistic directors, Natalia Kaliada and Nicolai Khalezin, fled their homeland’s dictatorship in 2011, so naturally dissension and discord form a crucial part of the story.
In “KS6: Small Forward,” through Oct. 13 at La MaMa, the retired professional basketball player Katsiaryna Snytsina looks back on her path from a child in a then-Soviet Republic to the hardwood courts of Europe. Kaliada and Khalezin’s staging includes plenty of video footage of Snytsina in action, particularly of her last team, the London Lions, triumphing in a European final just a few months ago. Khalezin’s scenic design is delineated by a three-point semicircle and a basket used for a good-natured, mid-show shooting competition.
Speaking in English, the lanky Snytsina, who is not a polished actor but has effortless charisma, describes growing up in a sports system based on bullying, living out of a suitcase and coming out as a lesbian (“my Instagram is considered extremist material by the Belarusian regime”). She also talks about what the violent repression of the pro-democracy protests of 2020 in Minsk meant to someone who had never voted — the episode is effectively staged with a basketball spurting out blood as it’s being pulverized.
The one time Snytsina, who now lives in London, verbalizes thoughts that might occur to some American viewers is when she brings up ballot results: “The Belarusian dictatorship is over 30 years old,” she says. “Just imagine if you vote Trump in, and he falsifies the next 30 years of elections. What will happen? Just imagine that!”
Thanks, but I’d rather not.
‘The Ask’
When you pick from a wedding registry, you don’t usually put conditions on your gift’s use. A big check to an organization, on the other hand, often comes with strong suggestions. “The Ask,” by Matthew Freeman, is about the power tango between donor and grantee. Even more specifically, it is about the American Civil Liberties Union, which happens to be Freeman’s employer.
As a two-hander pitting strongly defined perspectives, the play, through Sept. 28 at the Wild Project, is engineered to ignite post-performance arguments — even if they might not fall along the lines Freeman envisioned.
The longtime wealthy benefactor Greta (Betsy Aidem, a Tony Award nominee for “Prayer for the French Republic”) hosts the young A.C.L.U. gift-planning officer Tanner (Colleen Litchfield) and insists with confident, casual authority that the organization should stick to defending free speech and reproductive rights. Greta is critical of what she calls the A.C.L.U.’s “mission drift,” and the pair’s increasingly animated debate about the organization’s primary goals and strategies reflects one that has been happening in real life.
Some of the show doesn’t quite parse — I wondered why the A.C.L.U. would send someone relatively new to negotiate such an outsize request — but Jessi D. Hill directs the taut confrontation with a light, effective hand, and Aidem and Litchfield make two absorbing combatants.
‘Medea: Re-Versed’
At one point in the “The Ask,” Aidem pulled off a virtuosic one-sided phone conversation that drew applause at the performance I attended. The reaction to a big verbal spear in “Medea: Re-Versed,” through Oct. 13 at the Sheen Center, was just as audible. When Medea (the incandescent Sarin Monae West) told off her husband, Jason (Stephen Michael Spencer), many of the teenage girls at a recent weekday matinee snapped their fingers in approval.
Luis Quintero’s hip-hop rewriting of the Greek tragedy is presented by the respected companies Red Bull Theater and Bedlam, in a co-production with Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival. Both the writing and Nathan Winkelstein’s production teeter between endearingly scrappy and frustratingly scrappy as the show tries to inject a punkish, puckish flow into the ultimate tale of matricide.
Some lines land, as when Medea tells Jason “There’s no debating/Our ending/Was cocreated/You never were a father just a guy who procreated.” Others feel clumsy, including Medea reminding Creon (Jacob Ming-Trent) of those who “witch-hunted me/Because of my immigration.”
‘The Voices in Your Head’
Confrontations also lurk in Grier Mathiot and Billy McEntee’s comedy, which runs through Oct. 6, but for most of the show they are camouflaged by eccentricity and facade agreeability.
Before the play gets going, the audience of about 20 mill about in the main room of a storefront congregation, St. Lydia’s, a block from the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. You can have a herbal tea and a cookie as you wait and chat with other attendees. It eventually becomes clear that the person you had been talking to is part of the show, which takes the form of a support-group meeting.
The play and Ryan Dobrin’s production, which the Egg & Spoon Theater Collective brought back after a brief run in January, are immersive but not interactive — the characters do not put anybody on the spot besides each other. They are connected by an experience with a type of grief too specific to spoil, and over the course of an hour they process their feelings and engage in playacting exercises. There is evident warmth in their solidarity, even if some of the characters barely contain their prickliness.
But as with many groups, this one pulls up the drawbridge for a stranger who does not meet its self-ascribed standards. The rejection is swift, final. As Snytsina also learned the hard way, a community is also defined by who it casts off.
The post The Stage Combat Is Verbal in These Off Broadway Plays appeared first on New York Times.
