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Marin Ireland’s new play, “Pre-Existing Condition,” doesn’t include set off warnings; it barely even comes with a advertising description. The present’s web site says that it’s in regards to the aftermath of “a life-altering, dangerous relationship,” however doesn’t explicitly point out home violence.
Let’s state proper up entrance, then, that bodily abuse is that this play’s catalyst. And that the Connelly Theater Upstairs within the East Village is a tiny area, the place if the efficiency grew to become overwhelming it might be troublesome for an viewers member to go away unobtrusively.
Does it appear overly delicate to foreground that? For a much less potent playwriting debut, in a much less shattering manufacturing, it won’t be essential. But in Maria Dizzia’s quietly unadorned staging, and with an outstanding four-person solid that in the mean time stars an emotionally translucent Tatiana Maslany, watching this play is like seeing its writer open up her rib cage and present us all the things.
The central character, whom the script calls A, is struggling to place herself again collectively after a breakup with a person who hit her. The trauma has been consuming her, in opposition to her will and for longer than she would have thought.
“I really feel like I’m turning into the villain,” A tells her therapist. “I’m turning into this obsessive vengeful determine, as a result of he stated he’s sorry, so I’m the issue now.”
The therapist (a sublimely comforting Dael Orlandersmith) factors out, “His voice continues to be in your head.”
An spectacular rotation of actresses — Maslany, Dizzia, Deirdre O’Connell, Tavi Gevinson and Julia Chan — is slated to inhabit A in the course of the run: a intelligent manner of signaling universality whereas including box-office cachet in these unsure occasions for theater. (More on that under.) An equally sturdy lure is, frankly, the gossip issue: Ireland’s personal expertise of home violence a dozen years in the past in her relationship with the actor Scott Shepherd, once they have been showing in a present with the venerable Wooster Group.
What makes “Pre-Existing Condition” so highly effective, although, has nothing to do with that. It is A’s Everywoman nature, mixed with the susceptible physicality that’s so evident in such an intimate area: her breath, her welling tears, the placating smile she places on like a demure piece of armor when she runs the chance of upsetting a person.
Maslany, within the function solely by means of Thursday, performs with script in hand (the director’s alternative), but she wears her character as simply as A does the button-front boyfriend shirt that envelops her for a lot of the play. (Costumes are by Enver Chakartash.) Maslany’s A is wry, uncooked and in some way blurred inside, as if her very core had been knocked out of focus.
She doubts herself, blames herself, is fearful in methods she by no means was earlier than.
“I don’t need the large activity of my life now to be ‘coping with this,’” A says, and positively there are individuals in her life who want she would recover from it.
Like the self-righteous, ostensible good friend (Sarah Steele) who asks: “Do you need revenge or one thing? What would make you cheerful right here? You don’t need to spoil his life or something, proper?”
Then there’s an precise good friend (Greg Keller), outraged on A’s behalf, who tells her, “We’re too good and too liberal for somebody to simply get away with this, on this city, on this group.”
In “this group,” you may hear an implied reference to the world of downtown theater. Perhaps much less indirect is the scene the place A, scared to take heed to her voice mail messages, asks one other good friend (additionally Keller) to hear for her and converse the messages “together with them so I do know what they stated and the way they stated it” — an echo of a Wooster Group method for performing with in-ear audio.
“Pre-Existing Condition” doesn’t really feel like vengeance, although. It appears like one girl rising scarred by a not unusual expertise that blindsided her, and badly desirous to alert the others.
Across city in Chelsea, at Atlantic Stage 2, one other experiment in rotating casts and universality continues with Tony Shalhoub and Shohreh Aghdashloo taking up the rest of the run (by means of June 29) of Shayan Lotfi’s “What Became of Us,” a decades-spanning story of two siblings in an immigrant household.
Shalhoub’s presence was sure to make Jennifer Chang’s manufacturing a sizzling ticket, and it has. He and Aghdashloo have additionally made the efficiency itself a triumph, bringing a depth of emotion and energy of connection that have been lacking from this two-hander once I reviewed its first solid, BD Wong and Rosalind Chao.
Warm, vivid and humorous, Shalhoub and Aghdashloo are theatrical storytellers par excellence, tapped movingly into their characters’ lifetime of reminiscences. Warning to anybody who was left chilly by the ultimate monologue final time round: It is now a heartbreaker, simply because it’s meant to be.
Pre-Existing Condition
Through Aug. 3 on the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; connellytheater.org. Running time: 1 hour quarter-hour.
