Review: Six Characters in Search of Coherence

When you enter the Claire Tow Theater at the beginning of Six Characters, an usher offers you an orange bracelet and asks if you would like to participate. Ah, one of those plays, I thought. I responded with a no thank you, and as far as I could tell, so did a lot of other audience members. If you have a choice (don’t we always?), why bother? Imagine my surprise when I realized it was not one of those plays at all.

Turns out that the cast never asks anyone from the audience onto the stage, whether you take a bracelet or not. Why is that? Playwright Phillip Howze hints at an answer in his hodgepodge of a play, which uses Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist Six Characters in Search of an Author as a springboard for his own metatheatrical takedown of modern theater and the power structures that have kept it so blisteringly white since forever. Howze takes a backhoe’s worth of ideas (some fresh, some shopworn) and unloads them into two uneven acts that are sometimes comical but more often soporific.

With our ears full of blaring opera music (sound design by Christopher Darbassie), we meet a fascist Italian director (Julian Robertson) bumbling about on a stage illuminated by a ghost light and watch as he clumsily climbs ladders to reach unreachable ropes like some character out of Beckett. An audience member named Sassy (a hilarious Claudia Logan) gets up and seems about to bolt for the door, but then she decides to go up onstage and poke around — because doesn’t her orange bracelet give her the right to participate? The director, who occasionally speaks Italian and later gives a long Mussolini speech, doesn’t think so.

This scene initiates a first act of similarly absurdist episodes during which we meet a disgruntled cleaning woman (a luminous Seret Scott), a lovelorn security guard (Will Cobbs), Sassy’s love interest (CG), and a woman named Road who escaped slavery in a crate labeled “Old Shit” (Seven F.B. Duncombe delivering lines with chilling precision). Confusing as these scenes are at first, the first act comprises the plays biggest laughs and most thoughtful questions. If you had the keys to Lincoln Center, what would you do? Why do we still care about Shakespeare? How come “Black plays” must cater to white sensibilities? Howze bites off some big topics for us to chew on and then stirs them all in one pot.

Sadly, that’s not enough to sustain the play through a long two hours and 10 minutes. The second act pairs off the six characters into three traditional narratives involving a failed love relationship, a scene inside Road’s crate, and a long, mind-numbing monologue delivered by the cleaning woman. Director Dustin Wills, who also designed the sets, slows things down to a crawl in these final scenes, and Masha Tsimring’s dim lighting inside the crate doesn’t help matters at all. Only Montana Levi Blanco’s stunning patchwork dress for Duncombe keeps our eyes alert.

It’s a shame that the second act, despite being more dramatically “coherent,” pales in comparison to Howze’s provocative ideas in the first, which might have made a decent one-act on its own (minus Robertson’s tediously long Mussolini speech in Italian). I was disappointed to reach the play’s end and realize that those orange bracelets had not produced one iota of onstage audience participation. But Howze seems to be getting at something else: We participate in the oppressive power structures of theater whether we say yes to the bracelet or not. It’s a powerful message. Unfortunately, judging from the handful of empty seats after intermission, it’s not a message that everyone seemed willing to hear.