When some trifling citizens storm a renowned cultural center where they’re not meant to be, all hell breaks loose. Wigs go flying. Wounds get opened. An archive explodes. Will the audience make it out alive? Abolition takes on fresh meaning in SIX CHARACTERS, Phillip Howze’s new play on power, belonging, and the institutions we build.
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.
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.
2024 | Off-Broadway |
Lincoln Center Theater Off-Broadway Production Off-Broadway |
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