THE MARATHON OF MAKING ART

A process piece that asks as much of the audience as the ensemble

Perhaps the title of Nazareth Hassan’s new play Practice, which opened at Playwrights Horizons tonight, was inspired by the old joke: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.” Fittingly enough, the play follows a theater ensemble devising an avant-garde performance piece over an eight-week rehearsal period. It recalls Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation for its naturalistic portrayal of an acting class, and David Adjmi’s Stereophonic for its vérité-style rehearsal scenes—and its similarly unhurried, three-hour-plus running time. Practice is a marathon of process. If you have an appetite for slow-burn naturalism and behind-the-scenes dramaturgy, it will meet you where you live. Everyone else may feel trapped in a theatrical limbo—unsure whether they’re watching a rehearsal that accidentally admitted paying patrons or an Act III nobody ordered.

Opa AdeyemoHayward Leach

Advertised as a “shapeshifting psycho-comedy,” Practice opens in a single spotlight with seven separate auditions—each actor delivering the same monologue. The variations are amusing and revealing, especially as the unseen director offers notes from the back of the house over a microphone. The actors, eager to please and desperate to work, adjust and reinterpret on cue. Soon, the play shifts to a converted church in Brooklyn, where rehearsals for their performance piece unfold under the direction of Asa Leon (Ronald Peet), a “genius” auteur. His team includes dramaturg Danny (Mark Junek) who jumps at everything Asa demands, and the director’s designer-husband (Alex Wyse), whose trust fund helps to underwrite the project. Embodying the aspiring artists caught in Asa’s orbit include Opa Adeyemo, Karina Curet, Amandla Jahava, Hayward Leach, Maya Margarita, Susannah Perkins, and Omar Shafiuzzaman.

EnsembleRonald Peet, standing

As in A Chorus Line, the performers are asked to share deeply personal experiences. What follows are confessions, warmups, theater games, meals, hookups, parties, breakdowns, and betrayals. They’re not just devising a theater piece—they’re forming a commune where the seductions of power and belonging blur. During intermission—literally two hours later—the set for the play-within-the-play is fully realized. Act II presents its world-premiere performance in Berlin (running another full hour), consisting of choral readings drawn from everything heard in Act I.

Karina Curet, Susannah PerkinsAlex Wyse

To the company’s credit, there’s not a false note in sight. While it would be easy to parody the self-seriousness of experimental theater artists, the ensemble remains grounded and authentic throughout. So committed, in fact, that it becomes difficult to laugh at the characters or at Asa Leon’s manipulative methods, even when the play invites us to do so.

Mark JunekRonald Peet

The second-act set is exactly what we glimpsed earlier as a model: an enclosed performance box lined with walls of mirrors that prevent the actors from seeing the audience. Scenic designer Afsoon Pajoufar’s naturalistic church interior gives way to a thrillingly alien avant-garde installation. Lighting designer Masha Tsimring transforms realism into a pulsating dreamscape of fluorescent tubes, while sound designer Tei Blow saturates the space with club music, choral layering, and a looping opera solo that tediously blares through the entire intermission (for the audience members who left, I didn’t blame them). Camden Gonzales and director Keenan Tyler Oliphant contribute expressive movement sequences, while Rocío Mendez, as fight director and intimacy coordinator, orchestrates the chaos with meticulousness. Costume designers Brenda Abbandandolo and Karen Boyer contrast the everyday rehearsal wear with Act II’s yellow, plasticine “performance art” chic—and plant early clues to Asa’s narcissism.

Hayward Leach, Opa AdeyemoMaya Margarita

Inexplicably, Act II refuses to end in Berlin. Instead, we must watch stagehands mop up blood and saliva from the mirrored box, an actor stretch for their next gig in London, and another wander about looking for their water bottle. Only when an announcement proclaims, “The house is open,” do we finally get the blackout and curtain call.

Susannah PerkinsAmandla Jahava

Throughout, Asa Leon leads his company in a recurring mantra: “It’s okay that you’re useless. It’s okay that you’re useless. You’re useless—and that’s okay.” It begins as a helpful therapeutic exercise, but by the end, it may resonate just as much with those of us who endured the marathon.

Practice ultimately received its standing ovation—but in 2025, that feels less like a barometer of excellence than a collective impulse to get vertical. Call it praise for its insight or simply for making it to the finish line, the ovation felt earned—if not for sheer stamina on both sides of the footlights, than certainly a need to get one step closer to the exit.

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photos by Alexander Mejía, Bergamot

Practice
Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd Street
3 hours incl. intermission
ends on December 7, 2025
for tickets, visit Playwrights Horizons

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Opa Adeyemo, Susannah Perkins

Gregory Fletcher is an author, theater professor, playwright, director, and stage manager. His publishing credits include a craft book on playwriting entitled Shorts and Briefs, as well as a collection entitled A Playwright’s Dozen: 13 short plays. Other publishing includes two YA novels (Other People’s Crazy, and Other People’s Drama), 2 novellas in the series Inclusive Bedtime Stories, 2 short stories in The Night Bazaar series, and five essays. Website, Facebook, Instagram.