I viewed this during the live to zoom performance, presented by Jeremy O. Harris in October 2020.
Will Arbery’s Pulitzer finalist play is challenging, both in terms of the characters it presents, and the ideas it demands we confront. Framed around 4 young people reuniting at their faith-based college for an event celebrating one of their teachers receiving a prestigious promotion, the 4 are now at an afterparty, perhaps a bit tipsy, and dealing with the roiling emotions that are inevitable when a person returns to a place after some time.
These are challenging individuals, who bring us in to their world not through immersion, but through subversion; at first, the characters say and do things that seem perfectly “normal” (read; liberal) however as the play unfolds and their relationships and discussions return to old familiarities, their positions and statements begin to bristle against this. These individuals are completely familiar and yet altogether alien. They remind us that the people whom we may want to vilify in our thoughts for having views that seem untenable to us, may actually be more like us than we think.
The play, for me, demands we question the belief too tightly held, so aggressively and fervently grasped that it is morphed, and morphs us.
This was a re-staging for zoom of the original Playwrights Horizons production. Leveraging the individual screens of Zoom, director Danya Taymor created the dark stillness of a rural evening beautifully. While the stage version would have had all four in the same space, something unique happened when the actors were divided, when we saw each of them facing the camera directly, arguing with one another, but also somehow peering into the eyes of the viewer. The shifting quips and opinions, short responses bubbling into one another, in this format felt like a Facebook argument come to life.
I don’t want to give too much away, but would simply encourage that if you have the chance to read it or see it, do.