Everyone seems to have an opinion about Arinzé Kene’s almost impossible to categorize play Misty, which just opened at The Shed in Hudson Yards after hit runs at London’s Bush Theatre and Trafalgar Studios in 2018.
As the British actor-playwright reveals in one of Misty’s many meta sequences, chef friend Raymond (Liam Godwin) “had issues with [the] story.” His schoolteacher partner, Donna (Nadine Lee), chastised Kene out for writing a “generic angry young black man” character, then went even further: “It’s just a shame it’s a ni— play.” His mom is describing it as “a searing contemporary inner city gig theatre piece”—an excellent pull quote if ever there was one. His sister (Braxton Paul and Ifeoluwa Adeniyi, alternating in the role), meanwhile, is ready to call him out: “You better not be writing some red hot buffoonery to pander to the voyeuristic needs of the bourgeoisie.” His Instagram-famous artist girlfriend Dimples dismissed his writing as “urban safari jungle shit.” Raymond and Donna later accuse him of buying into the lucrative “black trauma” genre—they cite Django Unchained and 12 Years a Slave as examples—and call him a sellout. Even their baby has something to say: “Have a nice life, uncle Arinzé! Enjoy shucking and jiving on the Hudson Yard plantation!”
Mixing prose, poetry, songs, prerecorded audio clips (yes, those are snippets from Barack Obama’s speeches), and surreal humor (Kene gamely allows himself to get pelted with water balloons, though he smartly changes into a wetsuit first), Misty kicks off with a tale of violence on a London bus that snowballs into something much bigger. (“One shouldn’t settle disputes on the night bus,/ Shouldn’t settle disputes after ten at night, boss.”) The character calls himself—the only Black passenger on that double-decker, we surmise—Virus. Yet looking at his beloved East London—where his neighbors get whiter, the stores get bougier, and the prices get higher every day—the gentrifiers are actually the virus, Kene later concludes. “Here come yummy mummies and French au pairs,/ Pushing wide as fuck prams everywhere,” he riffs.
[Read David Finkle’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Kene—who played Biff Loman opposite Wendell Pierce and Sharon D. Clarke in the Marianne Elliott–directed Death of a Salesman at the Young Vic—is a positively electrifying presence, a what-can’t-he-do performer with an impressive gift for physical comedy (how did he get inside that balloon anyway, and how did he manage to get himself out?). Throughout, he’s accompanied by musicians Liam Godwin and Nadine Lee, aka the aforementioned Raymond and Donna; however, at a few points, such as in the song “Apparently,” a striking ode to former “good girl” Jade, Kene’s vocals get a bit obscured.
Apropos a subversive piece of performance art, the design for Misty is top-tier, particularly Daniel Denton’s video design, which transforms the back walls into arresting color-drenched canvases. And as far as what we think of his show—if we don’t like it, Kene has something to say about that. No spoilers, though. The freestyle is too good to ruin.
Misty opened March 9, 2022, at The Shed’s Griffin Theater and runs through April 2. Tickets and information: theshed.org
