Playwrights Horizons
star 4.4
Times Square, Manhattan · 146 reviews
Practice unfolds as a play about making, but what it really studies is being watched while becoming. From the moment the space closes in--sealed by reflective surfaces and bathed in an unrelenting red glow--the room feels less like a rehearsal hall than a site of exposure. This is not the comfort of process; it is the intimacy of risk.
The production understands queerness not as declaration but as condition. Bodies are doubled, refracted, multiplied. No gesture stays singular. The mirrored architecture insists that desire, doubt, and ambition circulate rather than settle. In this space, to practice is to repeat under observation, to learn oneself through others' gazes, to realize that even preparation is already performance.
What struck me most was how the ensemble handles interruption. Conversations overlap, derail, resume elsewhere. Humor arrives sideways, often just as a defense mechanism falters. This rhythm feels deeply queer: a refusal of clean arcs, a mistrust of mastery, an insistence that process is messy because relations are messy. The play listens closely to the small violences of collaboration--the subtle hierarchies, the soft coercions masked as care--and it does so without offering easy villains.
Practice keeps circling the politics of labor in artistic spaces, especially the question of who gets to be held and who must keep holding. There is something achingly familiar here for anyone who has worked in institutions while loving the work: the way "commitment" becomes endurance, the way passion is asked to absorb harm. Queerness surfaces in the gaps--moments of hesitation, glances that linger too long, pauses where something unsayable hovers.
By the time the cast gathers at curtain call, the exposure feels cumulative rather than resolved. We are left not with catharsis but with recognition: that practice is not neutral, that rehearsal trains us in certain ways of relating, and that showing up--again and again--can be both an act of devotion and a site of vulnerability.
Practice doesn't ask to be applauded for its answers. Instead, it stays with the trouble of process, asking what it means to keep practicing care, ethics, and presence when the room is lit, the walls reflect back, and nothing remains unseen.
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