The ensemble of Practice. Photo: Alexander Mejía, Bergamot

For me, the most powerful insight about theater in Practice, Nazareth Hassan’s new play at Playwrights Horizons, comes right at the top. We see seven actors—a variety of genders, ethnicities, and nationalities, but all of them young—audition with the same monologue for a director we can hear but not see; it’s very A Chorus Line, though Asa Leon (Ronald Peet) will end up onstage a lot more than Chorus Line’s Zach does. The first time, when the monologue is delivered by Ro (Opa Adayemo)–a tall Black man, easy in his body and throwing off casual charisma–we might think, until the first pause, until the first director’s note, that this story belongs to the character we’re meeting. Instead, we see six more people take very different cracks at the scene, and we’re reminded that it’s a piece of craft, a product of conscious choices scripted by a playwright, realized by an actor, shaped by a director. Asa gives notes–some insightful, some pure flattery, some needling little insights that might poke under the actors’ skin. The performances are different across a broad enough spectrum to make us wonder what Asa could possibly be casting for–the stoic minimalism of German Rinni (Susannah Perkins); the bubbly chumminess of Chilean Mel (Karina Curet); the twitchy British Tristan (Omar Shafiuzzaman); the intensely focused Savannah (Amandla Jahava). But every time, we feel a productive tension: the actors filling the lines with their intentions but also pushing back against the script; the director pressing them to analyze their choices. The director may be controlling from the God mic, but it’s the actor whose work we’re seeing, the writer whose words we’re hearing. At its best, that tension makes theater what it is.

Even here, though, there’s an inkling that the dynamics are going to shift in a dark direction. Because there’s another unseen presence in the room, who interjects occasionally to feed Asa pieces of information about the performers. We don’t know it yet, but it’s Danny (Alex Wyse), Asa’s dramaturg/consigliere, whose role in the process will stand uneasily between archivist and surveillance agent.

Once the company assembles, we immediately see that power balance start to shift. Asa is only a few years older than the twenty-somethings he’s cast, but they’re already a culturally appointed auteur, with a MacArthur grant and a commission from an avant-garde German theater for a full-length piece of work. They’re also part of a theatrical power couple: Asa the young Black genius director and their husband/designer, Walton (Mark Junek), who is white, older, and, we soon discover, a trust fund kid who is funding more of the enterprise than Asa’s Genius grant. They’re building a piece of derived theater on the lives—and the traumas—of the seven members of the newly formed company, who will live together for eight weeks, push themselves physically and mentally, and come out of it with a piece that will tour Europe. It’s an “amazing opportunity” for the striving young actors; it’s something much more self-aggrandizing for Asa. 

And as revelation turns into manipulation, and as we see the contours of the bizarre surveillance state that Asa and Danny are using to weaponize the idea of accountability, the “let’s all put on a show” enthusiasm starts to curdle into something more unsettling. Practice’s first act unspools across the eight weeks of the rehearsal process, and we in the audience are slowly pushed toward suspicion of Asa’s process–which suspicion is given an internal mouthpiece in Angelique (Maya Margarita), a trans Black woman who becomes increasingly unwilling to obliterate her own boundaries in the service of this work. 

It’s not a new revelation that directors can abuse their power and exploit the very vulnerability integral to an actor’s craft; as Hassan notes in a program essay, the first question asked of the students in their first acting class was: “What’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to you?” In Practice, Hassan and director Keenan Tyler Oliphant amp up both the sinister and the cynical ways that power is used: an exercise in exploitation all the more tyrannical for being fundamentally trivial, for being used to create a 30-minute piece of performance rather than, say, a terrorist cell. The uneasy skill of Practice is how successfully it teeters on the line between black comedy and psychological suspense: It’s a black joke that Asa uses gourmet jellybeans as an instrument of psychological torture, but it’s a lot less funny to see the micro-surveillance state Asa and Danny erect around the performers and then weaponize back at them,  pulling out tapes and transcripts that are meant to document the process and help shape the material and using them as weapons to impeach the performers’ integrity. 

Act 1 clocks in over two hours, and while we do eventually get disgusted by Asa’s manipulations, there’s still room for a certain ambiguity about his intentions: Has he bought into his own hype, or is he breaking people down for sport? Can the art made out of this possibly justify the means? Is the joke on us for being eager to consume a product made under such conditions? How much is all of this just an attempt by Walton–the “pay pig” who started as Asa’s teacher–to relieve himself of the “burden” of his trust fund–or to find more vulnerable young men of color to play sex games with, as he does with ensemble member Keeyon (Hayward Leach)?

But then the comparatively brief Act 2 shows us the resulting piece, Self Awareness Exercise 001, on tour in Berlin, and then a few minutes before curtain time in London. The ensemble performs on Walton’s set (which we see in a model in Act 1; the actual set design is by Afsoon Pajoufar), a sealed-in box made of two-way mirrors, where we see in but the actors, often performing in masks, see only their own reflections. No one besides Angelique has jumped ship, and even after the performance apparently descends into violence, they show up for the next engagement: it’s all part of the act, and (as we see Danny filming one of the performers warming up) the surveillance continues as well. 

And a lot of the discomfiting ambiguity tips over into more cynical satire. All credit to Hassan and Oliphant for creating the artifact of Self-Expression: the identical costumes that look like crime-scene boiler suits (especially juxtaposed with Brenda Abbandandolo and Karen Boyer’s character-limning wardrobes from act 1), the pastel-toned masks, the stylized movement (by Oliphant and Camden Gonzales), the actors re-presenting one another’s traumatic stories as processed through Asa’s filter. But the narration that Asa has scripted for the company to deliver in unison too blatantly outlays the malicious intent: it’s the monologue of the serial killer who can’t resist the egotistic impulse to tell the detective just how they got away with it. The murk was more unsettling than the gleeful mustache-twirling. Which, to be fair, is no doubt part of the point; the audience’s appetite for trauma narrative and susceptibility to cultlike thinking on the subject of art are absolutely among the things Hassan and Oliphant are indicting. Still, it almost becomes an indictment of the performers as well to see them straightforwardly narrating Asa’s explicitly sinister process and continuing to participate in the work. The balance of control has been tipped so thoroughly away from them that the productive tension of the art collapses. 

And yet: take one more step back, and they’re in on the joke, too. After all, they’re literally performing for themselves, for their own reflections. As each re-plays one of the other’s traumas, we see them take on one another’s verbal tics, accents; we are reminded how not naturalistic these performances have always been. Act 1 predisposes us to be suspicious of Act 2; Act 2 reflects back on the artificiality of Act 1. 

“What’s the very worst thing I could do with this skill set?” asks Hassan in the press release—and then creates Asa as an avatar for that question, and has them make a piece of art that flaunts contempt for the company and the audience on the way to Asa’s self-indictment. In the end, though, Asa’s “self awareness exercise” is still the dynamic Hassan and Oliphant are centering. The rest of the ensemble is granted little agency or character development beyond their extracted secrets. It’s a fine line between exposé and exploitation and I’m not sure which side Practice comes down in the end. 

I can’t stop thinking about it, though. And I can’t stop thinking about the thread that runs subtly through it all, about the real power: the power of money. “I surely couldn’t afford to be an artist until I found a white man rich enough to provide for me,” says Asa in one of Self Awareness Exercise’s choral monologues.Asa’s running the cult, but Walton may be pulling the strings.