Essentially a 75-minute backstage story enveloped within a three-hour drama, the outcome of Practice seems obvious fairly early on, so the play and its production that premiered at Playwrights Horizons on Tuesday grew tiresome for me. Others, especially younger viewers, may enjoy more the rehearsal room rants, the physical theater exercises and the sexy after-hour intrigues concocted by author Nazareth Hassan for their dramedy regarding a bunch of very green actors as they strive to develop an experimental ensemble piece under the stern guidance of an imperious director.
Between the contemporary back stories of ten or so characters living and working together intimately in isolated circumstances, numerous brief scenes, the jostling aside of friends to please the group’s leader, and repetitive sequences growing ritualistic with time, Practice suggests the entire season of some Big Brother sort of reality series about the theater squeezed into a relatively brief period.
Beginning with auditions as several actors interpret the same monologue in quite different modes, Hassan traces the ensemble’s personal and theatrical process all the way from Brooklyn to stages in Berlin and London. Among the drama’s variously straight, gay, bi, trans, queer and whatever characters expect to hear about or to witness sorrows, confessions, betrayals, revelations, and mind games, subtle and otherwise. While Hassan’s backstage study in power and ultimately its abuse proves more exhausting than profound, the playwright offers some juicy chunks of talk composed in present-day rhythms and language.
Keenan Tyler Oliphant, the director, assembles an attractive, youthful company to guide through the rigors of Hassan’s play, which makes considerable physical demands. Perhaps stars of tomorrow glimmer among the talented group led by Ronald Peet as the story’s deceptively compassionate maestro, so let’s name everybody: Opa Adeyemo, Karina Curet, Amandla Jahava, Mark Junek, Hayward Leach, Maya Margarita, Susannah Perkins, Omar Shafiuzzaman and Alex Wyse. Costume designers Brenda Abbandandolo and Karen Boyer supply casual, character-distinctive clothes that can be quickly changed as time passes. Oliphant and Camden Gonzales devise the extensive, increasingly complex movement the troupe executes in their rehearsals that will climax during a performance that grows frenzied to the point of looking dangerous.
Scenic designer Afsoon Pajoufar provides appropriate, fluent environs; and later, in conjunction with lighting designer Masha Tsimring, sound designer Tei Blow and their director, an effective hallucinatory performance sequence apparently happening within a space enclosed by a double-sided mirror.
People who particularly enjoy backstage drama may find sufficient novelty in Practice to stay interested in the process that Hassan observes in fulsome detail. Certainly the production that Oliphant, his associates and their actors create makes the most of this new work, and that’s why Playwrights Horizons exists.
Practice opened November 18, 2025, at Playwrights Horizons and runs through December 7. Tickets and information: playwrightshorizons.org
