Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Phillip Howze’s unruly SIX CHARACTERS explodes with ideas, harnessing Pirandello and Beckett for its own aims

• By drediman
• August 16, 2024
• No Comments

Over at Lincoln Center Theater’s Claire Tow Theater, you’ll find LCT3’s production of Six Characters by Phillip Howze. A spin on Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 play Six Characters in Search of an Author, Howze’s new play retains Pirandello’s absurdist meta-theatricality, but bending it to serve the playwright’s own musings around the ability for Blackness and the American theater — at least as we know it today — to meaningfully co-exist. Like the play on which it’s based, Six Characters takes place in a theater, where a Black director attempts to keep order — and his wits — when five Black characters manage to infiltrate his in-the-works production.

Howze is an artist that I first encountered in an interactive solo show for the Bushwick Starr entitled Self Portraits (Deluxe), in which he displayed an astute knack for dissecting identity, as well as acknowledging the deep rootedness of racism and the limitations of conventional theater (and language) to articulate the issue sufficiently. Similarly, Six Characters explodes with ideas — swirling and clashing in this stew of a play — but on a grander scale. The first act is a surreal, high octane comedy of manners that introduces the players, depicting them exuberantly grappling with and making sense of their place in American theater. Unsurprisingly, they ultimately throw their hands up in frustration and exhaustion. Only the director, keeps his course, heading down the path paved by the establishment. The second act takes a somber turn — showing the characters, resigned but wiser, coming to terms with this impasse. Here, the playwright harnesses the aesthetic of the works of Samuel Beckett (e.g., there are strong shades of Endgame), particularly as evidenced by the rambling language and stark existentialism of these latter scenes. Suffice to say, Howze offers no easy answers in his messy and often contradictory play.

In production, the unruly play is held together in rather spectacular fashion by the imaginatively elaborate yet eloquent staging by Dustin Wills (also credited as the set designer), who has been establishing himself of late as a director of the first order (his credits also include memorable productions of similarly difficult plays like John Caswell Jr.’s Wet Brain and Hansol Jung’s Wolf Play). Thanks largely to the animated, thrillingly committed ensemble cast, Wills’s production not only basks in the play’s uncomfortable grey areas, it also attempts to take a magnifying glass to them. It’s a brave and notable first step.

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SIX CHARACTERS
Off-Broadway, Play
Lincoln Center Theater at the Claire Tow Theater
2 hours, 15 minutes (with one intermission)
Through August 25