Reviews NYCOff-Broadway Published 1 February 2025

Review: Nina at Theaterlab

Theaterlab ⋄ January 23-February 9, 2025

Forrest Malloy’s backstage (melo)drama is filled with strong performances and incisively directed by Katie Birenboim. Loren Noveck reviews.

Loren Noveck
Francesca Carpanini, Nina Grollman, and Jasminn Johnson in Nina. Photo: Emilio Madrid

Francesca Carpanini, Nina Grollman, and Jasminn Johnson in Nina. Photo: Emilio Madrid

A play like Nina, in which all five characters are actors, is a tricky thing. And here, the characters are not only actors but actors in training, people who spend their days learning how to portray emotions convincingly for an audience. Their emotions and experiences are real, yes–and as one of the women here is fond of saying, everyone gets to have their own experience. But they’re also, always, mining their own feelings and the actions and mannerisms of their nearest and dearest for material. “Everyone is copy,” says Kyla, another character. “You’re a whole-ass inspiration vampire.” They’re vacuuming up one another as material, all the time, and trying out their own–watching each other watch each other, trained to act and to react. So while there are moments when Forrest Malloy’s script strikes a false note, when the characters say things that feel calculated or when emotions feel massaged, it’s entirely possible that’s part of the plan. False notes are being struck as these characters learn where their actual talents for persuasion lie. There are a few moments, toward the end, when it does feel like the masks truly drop, when we’re truly seeing what lies underneath all that training. The results can be devastating. 

The entire piece is set in a shared dressing room, and the five-person ensemble comprises the female half of a cohort at a NYC acting conservatory as they begin their final year of the program. Three of them are white, two Black; they’re mostly in their mid to late twenties (so post-college, post-a few years in the real world), with one younger exception; and they’ve been training together for two years. This year will culminate with the famed “showcase,” their entry into the “real world” of casting directors and booking gigs. They’ve trained as an ensemble but now they’re at the point where their symbiosis starts to become a liability rather than a strength, as they’re “on the brink of capitalism ripping [them] apart,” as Cate says. (Cate has the idea that they’ll all work together to take a show to the Edinburgh Fringe in August, but it seems pretty clear that she’s the only one who thinks that might actually happen, and possibly the only one who really wants it to.) 

The intimate TheaterLab space and Wilson Chin’s set, packed with telling detail (a stocked tea cart; stacks of books and scripts on each table; favorite lotions and brands of tissue and cushions and lamps for each person), bring us right in to the women’s stifling intimacy. (Ásta Bennie-Hostetter’s costumes, too, paint the shared world with richness, from favorite wardrobe pieces to the way each wears a corset when in period costume.) Three of the five dressing tables face the audience; Cate (Francesca Carpanini), Zoe (Katherine Reis), and Kyla (Jasminn Johnson) literally use the audience as their mirror. It is a smart gesture in both design and Katie Birenboim’s direction to set the space up that way, and it’s also a smart character note: Cate, Zoe, and Kyla are the ones who seem to be inhaling validation and/or reassurance from their audiences, in very different ways. Cate is always simultaneously speaking and analyzing the results and effectiveness of what she says; she’s the most performatively feminist, the most performatively performative, and thrives on her self-given rep of speaking truth to power. (It’s a brilliant touch in the costume design and imagination of the character to have her frequently in a Vassar sweatshirt.) Zoe is the classic pretty white ingenue, basking in a spotlight and never for a moment questioning whether she deserves the center of attention. But Kyla goes the other way: steeped in self-doubt and feeling undervalued by the program (in ways that are not unrelated to her being Black and less financially secure than some of the others appear to be), she genuinely seems not to know whether she’s worth looking at. The two who share the upstage wall, facing away from us into real mirrors, Lilith (Nina Grollman) and Erika (Aigner Mizzelle), feel more self-possessed and self-directed. Lilith is a writer as well as an actor. (This is one of the script’s few missteps; we see her carrying around pages but we never know anything about the play or feel her drive as a writer in writing it, only mild disappointment when the others don’t want to read it. It feels like a missed opportunity to add another layer of mirroring and self-critique to the whole.) Meanwhile, Erika, the other Black woman in the group, is quick to see how the institution won’t look out for her and calmly pursues her own opportunities outside this room.

The five are a tight group, but they also form other, smaller circles: Lilith and Erika start dating right at the beginning of the show (though in trying not to make the show about that relationship, Malloy and the actors sometimes seem to forget about it except when Lilith and Erika are arguing). Zoe leans on Kyla; Erika sticks up for Zoe. And they’re also competitors, one of them winning out over the other four for every role (or in Kyla’s case, often losing out and ending up with the smallest non-speaking parts). But when Zoe begins a relationship with one of their teachers, and then puts Kyla in the uncomfortable position of keeping the secret for her, the group starts to fracture at the seams. 

We see only snippets of their work as actors (notable, and hilariously, Cate practicing a Shakespeare monologue larded with bits of overexploited technique in a way that feels like the director truly having fun with the opportunity to exploit the worst excesses of training), but we can easily place them on sort of a continuum of actorliness, from Zoe’s wide-eyed faux naivete through Lilith’s earthy competence and Kyla’s rawer emotional range to Cate’s nervy energy and Erika’s conscious shift from street smart persona. Birenboim’s confident and precise direction brings out strong, nuanced performances in all five actors; the play shines in small emotional details that can I think be credited to Birenboim as much as to Malloy: The quietly confident self-reliance of Mizzelle’s Erika set against the more showoffy confidence of Carpanini’s Cate in their professional sphere and against Grollman’s more emotionally guarded Lilith in their personal life. The self-important melodrama of Reis’s Zoe set against Johnson’s more vulnerable  Kyla, whose arc takes her from the most tentative to being able to hold space as a protagonist.

Malloy obviously has enormous respect for actor training, but also sees its ridiculousness, and Birenboim adds wonderful details in the way we see them rehearse, respond to notes. The jargon flies thick and fast, but because we’re also seeing it all play out in real time, we don’t get lost. And the play’s tricky, hall-of-mirrors climax puts it all into striking action, as Kyla, cast in their final show as the titular Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull, turns that lens on Zoe mid-breakdown, using Zoe’s “protagonist syndrome” to inform her work. It’s empathy, emotional vampirism, revenge–and the apotheosis of everything they’ve learned. It might make Kyla a terrible person. It also might make her a star. And, Nina seems to be asking, which of those things do we value, anyway?


Loren Noveck

Loren Noveck is a writer, editor, dramaturg, and recovering Off-Off-Broadway producer, who was for many years the literary manager of Six Figures Theatre Company. She has written for The Brooklyn Rail, The Brooklyn Paper nytheatre.com, and NYTheater now, and currently writes occasionally for HowlRound and WIT Online. In her non-theatrical life, she works in book publishing.

Review: Nina at Theaterlab Show Info


Produced by Theaterlab

Directed by Katie Birenboim

Written by Forrest Malloy

Scenic Design Wilson Chin

Costume Design Ásta Bennie-Hostetter

Lighting Design Wheeler Moon

Sound Design Brandon Bulls

Cast includes Francesca Carpanini, Nina Grollman, Jasminn Johnson, Aigner Mizzelle, Katherine Reis

Link
Show Details & Tickets

Running Time 1 hr 50 minutes


the
Exeunt
newsletter


Enter your email address below to get an occasional email with Exeunt updates and featured articles.