Six Characters Off-Broadway Reviews

Taking aim at more targets than it can accommodate, the play is scattershot but genuinely experimental and, as such, daring programming by Evan Cabnet, LCT3’s departing artistic director, who was recently named to the same role at Second Stage Theater.

Six Characters is a dark comedy that subverts expectations and challenges the purpose of theatre. Its non-linear structure and complex themes are difficult to follow, and the play’s length drags, leaving audiences to wonder about its meaning and significance.

Vintage recordings of Black opera divas singing glorious arias are played before the show, during intermission and afterward. They are lovely to hear, of course, but is the music meant to be satirical of the grandiloquent white theater that the playwright denounces? That’s just one more mystery lurking amid many murky intents and motives in the ambitious and ultimately frustrating Six Characters.

I’m not sure whether I’ve done justice to these scenes or, conversely, told you too much. For what it’s worth, the cast is game, and the design is meticulous — right down to those yellow wristbands.