Totally Sold-Out ...Fairview

[edjames]

Now at The Soho Rep, Farr off-Broadway, this show has been extended and within 30 minutes sold-out the run.

 

I can only hope it will either be extended, again, of moved to a larger venue!

 

In This Play About Race, ‘People Need to Be Uncomfortable’

Since June 17, playgoers have clapped for Jackie Sibblies Drury’s divisive “Fairview” at Soho Rep. But they’ve also cried and raged and staggered out stunned. At the theater, in the street outside and later on social media, spectators have sorted through knotty responses that no string of emojis can capture.

 

On a recent Saturday, Ms. Drury prepared to greet a matinee audience of family and friends. As she stepped into Añejo, a restaurant just down the street from the theater, a table of 20 broke into applause. Other tables started applauding, too. It must have seemed like the thing to do. Ms. Drury, 36, looked pleased and embarrassed and also a little relieved.

 

“Fairview” begins as an easygoing comedy about a middle-class black family gathering for a birthday dinner and ends somewhere else entirely. A play about race, though not only about race, it includes a series of gestures and invitations that divide the audience. Divide the audience figuratively? Sure. That, too. In The New York Times, Ben Brantley suggested that “Fairview” would have you squirming in your seat. “You will also wind up questioning your basic right to sit there,” he wrote.

 

The play will run for at least another month, so describing just how it achieves this unease doesn’t seem quite fair. But Ms. Drury; the play’s associate director, Garrett Allen; and a couple of the actors were willing to speak about why they are making audiences so uncomfortable and how it feels to rattle them matinee after matinee, night after night.

 

Ms. Drury’s earlier plays, “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation …”about a group of theatermakers and “Really,” about a photographer’s white mother and black girlfriend, and “Social Creatures,” about well, zombies, were already interested in questions of identity and perception.

 

“Fairview,” which expands on these questions, began a few years ago when Ms. Drury and the play’s director, Sarah Benson, began having conversations about surveillance culture and the place of black bodies in public spaces. (Ms. Benson was out of the country and unavailable for an interview.)

 

Theater is itself a public space of sorts, and Ms. Drury wondered what it means for audiences, especially white, middle-class audiences, to consume stories about marginalized communities. She worried that people might exercise their empathy “by going and seeing the show and because you’ve done it there, then there’s no need to change anything about your life,” she said over a hurried glass of wine before she walked over to Añejo.

 

“Fairview” is purpose-built to offer more of a workout. Sitting down, shutting up, clapping at the end — that’s what most shows demand of an audience. But “Fairview” is different. It rips up that social contract, suggesting that spectatorship might not always be innocent or passive or nice. The piece went “through all these different ideas about different ways to have an audience aware of being watched and watching other people and making judgments,” Ms. Drury said.

 

During spring rehearsals there were many hypothetical conversations about how audiences might respond to the piece and what the actors should do in volatile situations. (Backup is in place in case a confrontation goes too far. It hasn’t yet been needed.)

 

“There was a general curiosity in terms of how this play would go over,” said Heather Alicia Simms, who plays Beverly, speaking by telephone. She had never done a play like this. Neither had anyone else in the room. No one knew what to expect.

 

Now that it has been running for weeks, they still don’t. “It’s never comfortable,” Ms. Simms said. Those conversations continue.

 

When it comes to how an audience handles the play, “there are a billion and one possibilities,” said Mx. Allen, the associate director, who prefers the gender-neutral honorific. “Every response is incredibly valid.”

 

Discomfort doesn’t seem to divide along racial lines. White audience members and audience members who don’t identify as white have enjoyed it. White and nonwhite audience members haven’t. There have been complaints — on Twitter, on Show-Score — that the play went too far and complaints that it didn’t go far enough. (One Show-Score was a paragon of cognitive dissonance: “Ambitious, Great acting, Indulgent, Provocative, Bloated.”)

 

That’s O.K. with the playwright. “A lot of people who have been upset by it have also intellectually engaged with it and I don’t know that being upset is wrong,” she said.

 

Reactions vary widely not only from one performance to another but also within the same performance, which can be jarring. “I think that the play is asking people to realize that their individual responses to the play are theirs alone and that other people are having different responses,” Ms. Drury said.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/06/theater/fairview-play-race.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Ftheater&action=click&contentCollection=theater&region=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=sectionfront

[edjames]

Finally announced a new venue...but BROOKLYN? off-off-off-off-off Broadway for sure.

Looks like I'll have to do a road trip!

 

‘Fairview’ Will Return to the New York Stage

 

After a successful run at the 73-seat Soho Rep theater last summer, Jackie Sibblies Drury’s acclaimed play “Fairview” will return to challenge audiences in a bigger space this June.

The play, which both chief theater critics for The New York Times named among the year’s top 10 productions, will be remounted at Theater for a New Audience’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, in Brooklyn, from June 2 to June 30.

The return engagement marks the second time that the Polonsky’s 299-seat main stage has hosted a play that originated at Soho Rep, following “An Octoroon,” Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s formally inventive comedy about race and American history, which ran at the Polonsky in 2015.

On its face, “Fairview” is about an extended black family preparing for an important dinner. The tone starts off light and the plot stays within the confines of a family comedy. But as the play progresses, the mood shifts and the assumptions it invites are turned on their heads.

“You begin watching by feeling mildly amused, then uneasy, then annoyed, then unsettled,” Ben Brantley wrote in his review for the Times. “And then abruptly you’re free-falling down a rabbit hole, and there’s no safe landing in sight.”

“Fairview,” which was directed by Sarah Benson, Soho Rep’s artistic director, was extended three times there. The play moved to Berkeley Repertory Theater, which co-commissioned it, in October.

Casting for the new production has not been announced. But the play’s much-discussed staging will be retained and adapted for the Polonsky, according to a publicist for the show.

Ms. Drury’s new play, “Marys Seacole,” begins previews at Lincoln Center Theater on Feb. 9.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

This is the very definition of why great theatre exists. To make people question, to think.

 

I didn't get to see this, but did follow the chatter and will not make the same mistake twice. To Brooklyn I go.

[edjames]

Yes, me too. Off I go, out-of-town!

The Polonsky Shakepeare Center is located in downtown Brooklyn a block or so from BAM. A quick train from Manhattan or a short Uber drive.

WARNING: Right now they are not selling single tickets and you MUST become a subscriber (in advance) to assure a seat. It's a two show requirement. Fairview AND Julius Caesar. But at $60 bucks a pop, it's still a worthwhile deal. Tickets available to subscribers on Feb 19. Sure to go fast...a very, very limited run.

[edjames]

And off I went off to downtown Brooklyn. It's a neighborhood I am very familiar with and this new theater is located almost across the street from BAM, and other theaters in the neighborhood. It's a lovely new theater complex and the seating is stadium style, so sight lines are not a problem. I sat in row E which has a large enough space to stretch out your legs.

 

The play? Well, I agree it makes you question racism, however, as the play begins you think it's going in one direction and then it moves into another, and another, and another. It's almost like being on a psychedelic drug trip as the play, and the characters become more and more outrageous. The musical sound track is straight out of the 70's and 80's, classic soul hits. At the end, the play becomes very confrontational and in-your-face.

The play ends it's run on June 30.

 

Ben Brantley's review says it all:

 

Review: Theater as Sabotage in the Dazzling ‘Fairview’

 

Let me give you fair warning on “Fairview,” Jackie Sibblies Drury’s dazzling and ruthless new play: If you see it — and you must — you will not be comfortable.

That’s not because the seats at Soho Rep, where this extraordinary show opened on Sunday night, are any harder or lumpier than those of most small, downtown theaters. But you will undoubtedly be squirming in yours.

You will also wind up questioning your basic right to sit there, especially if, like the majority of New York theatergoers, you are a white person. And some time after the show has ended, when you’re thinking straight again, you’ll realize just how artfully you have been toyed with before the final kill, as the mouse to one canny cat of a play.

Directed with disarming smoothness and military precision by Sarah Benson, “Fairview” begins amicably enough, or so it would appear. What occurs in its protracted first scene isn’t all that different from a standard-issue sitcom episode of, say, the mid-to-late 1980s.

A middle-class, impeccably coifed and made-up mom, Beverly Fraser (Heather Alicia Simms), is anxiously preparing for a party in her fastidiously appointed, beige-on-beige home. It’s her formidable mother’s birthday, and Beverly wants everything to be perfect.

But her loving husband, Dayton (Charles Browning); their teenage daughter, Keisha (MaYaa Boateng); and especially Beverly’s officious sister, Jasmine (Roslyn Ruff), aren’t being very helpful. Will the carrots be peeled and cooked, the cake baked and the table set as it should be before grandma, who is upstairs, makes her entrance?

Sounds like a snooze, doesn’t it? Still, you may detect an occasional tear — so small it barely lets light through — in the glossy expositional blandness. For instance, the music Beverly has on melts and mutates for a microsecond; every now and then, the expression on her face turns lost and wary; and the geography of the characters’ entrances and exits feels strangely illogical, when you think about it.

And that, really, is all I can say about what happens in “Fairview,” at least without spoiling one of the most exquisitely and systematically arranged ambushes of an unsuspecting audience in years. Oh, I do need to mention that the Fraser family is black.

I know, I know. That distinction is immaterial in the 21st century, at least in reference to what appears to be a kind of every-person generic comedy.

Yeah, right. And I have a miracle diet I’d like to sell you.

Ms. Drury has been a playwright to watch for several years now, with intellectually probing, form-questioning works that include “Really” and “We Are Proud to Present …” But nothing she has done previously has prepared audiences for “Fairview,” starting with a title whose resonance fully registers only after the play is over.

Examined element by element, “Fairview” presents nothing theatrically new. Many of its tools of subversion date to the early days of the Absurdists and the mind games of Pirandello and Ionesco, while others — more technologically sophisticated — are staples of the contemporary European avant-garde.

But Ms. Drury and Ms. Benson have assembled vintage ingredients with a purposeful, very American ingenuity that restores the shock value to such classic audience baiting. And I found myself thinking that this must be what it was like to come upon the work of Edward Albee — the tutelary deity of the theater of discomfort — Off Broadway in the early 1960s.

“Fairview” is structured as a series of perspective-altering surprises, and they keep coming at you even when you think its creators must surely have emptied their bag of tricks. You begin watching by feeling mildly amused, then uneasy, then annoyed, then unsettled. And then abruptly you’re free-falling down a rabbit hole, and there’s no safe landing in sight.

This sustained act of sabotage is realized by an impeccably synced team. As the artistic director of Soho Rep, where she staged Sarah Kane’s “Blasted” and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octoroon,” Ms. Benson is a past master of the drama of disruption, and she is at the top of her game here.

Every aspect of “Fairview” has a slyly manipulative raison d’être. That includes Mimi Lien’s tidily framed set, with its invisible mirror of a fourth wall; Montana Levi Blanco’s increasingly outrageous costumes; and the “gotcha!” lighting (by Amith Chandrashaker) and sound (Mikaal Sulaiman).

But don’t underestimate the importance of Ryan Courtney’s props, which assume alarmingly multifarious roles, and Raja Feather Kelly’s choreography. Dancing is a big part of “Fairview,” but it isn’t there for entertainment purposes, or not for long, anyway.

As for the ensemble — which also includes Hannah Cabell, Natalia Payne, Jed Resnick and Luke Robertson — it does exactly what the play requires of it, which is saying something. The women, especially, inhabit their artificially constructed roles with an in-the-moment immediacy, only marginally rimmed with unease.

Playing the youngest family member, Ms. Boateng also winds up with the heaviest acting duties, and she executes them with unblinking, confrontational clarity. “Isn’t she cute?” a part of you may say when her Keisha bounds onto the stage. You will be punished for ever having thought so.

As you may have inferred, “Fairview” is all about race, and especially about how white people look at black people. More broadly, you might argue, it’s about the defective lenses through which we view one another and the world around us. But, no, it’s all about race.

It may seem untoward to suggest that anything good is emerging from the ethnically dis-United States at this frightening juncture in its history. But it’s worth remarking that racial alienation and division have been the basis for the most exciting American plays of recent years, including “An Octoroon” and Scott R. Sheppard and Jennifer Kidwell’s “Underground Railroad Game.”

“Fairview” is a galvanizing addition to this gallery. It is also a glorious, scary reminder of the unmatched power of live theater to rattle, roil and shake us wide awake.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/theater/review-theater-as-sabotage-in-the-dazzling-fairview.html