Nazareth Hassan's 'Practice' Horrified Me, As Intended
By Sara Holdren, a theater director and Pulitzer-finalist critic at New York
What does horror look like onstage? There are spooky ghost stories, bloodbaths, and heroically lo-fi scarefests. But what about a different kind of horror? One that's not about supernatural or gory tropes, but rather a gradual and inevitable consumption of autonomy and self-worth. That's the horror of Nazareth Hassan's play, 'Practice'.
The play follows a group of actors who are stuck in a house with a monster, possibly more than one. For almost three hours, we watch them, like flies mummified in spider silk, as they're gradually and inevitably consumed. Worse, these bugs have enthusiastically offered themselves up to the web, have even fought for a place in it. It's stomach-curdling, to say the least.
But 'Practice' is more than just a horror story. It's a love letter to theater, in the sense of James Baldwin's reframing of patriotism. Hassan argues that theater is an art dangerously and perhaps inextricably entangled with power. Making it and consuming it is an act of 'emptying your vessel to be filled by the will of whomever can afford to be an artist these days'.
The play is broken into a pair of bravely nonstandard pieces: a two-hour first act in which we watch the company rehearse, and a roughly 40-minute second act in which we witness the poison fruits of their labor. The first act is particularly chilling, as we see the actors' auditions for the project, and the director's sinister values chart, which they use to hold each other accountable.
The second act is a wild showcase for the actors, as they embody characters subsumed to the corrupt will of their great leader. But it's also a satire, and a serious one at that. Hassan is advancing an empathetic hypothesis: that abusers are re-creating the abuse they received, and that they are begging, through public acts of violence, to be stopped.
'Practice' is a gut-churning investigative journalism, an exposé of root rot. It's a warning to the theater world, and a call for an exorcism of the theater's addiction to power. The play is at Playwrights Horizons through December 7.
