CurtainUp
CurtainUp
The Internet Theater Magazine of Reviews, Features, Annotated Listings
HOME PAGE

SITE GUIDE

SEARCH


REVIEWS

REVIEW ARCHIVES

ADVERTISING AT CURTAINUP

FEATURES
BOOKS and CDs

OTHER PLACES
Berkshires
London
California
New Jersey
DC
Connecticut
Philadelphia
> PLAYWRIGHTS' ALBUMS

LETTERS TO EDITOR

FILM

LINKS

MISCELLANEOUS
Masthead
A CurtainUp Review
HIR

I'm doing things. I'm not missing being part of the world to hang out with your father.— Paige, the family matriarch who is redefining her role, along with that of the men in her life.

Dad is part of the world.— Isaac, the son returning to a home as messy as the war in Afghanistan in which he served as a Marine.
HIR
Kristine Nielsen and Cameron Scoggins
Drag performance artist Taylor Mac's HIR is billed as a comedy. And indeed, the audience at the performance I attended laughed often. Chief laugh getter was Kristine Nielsen, as Paige, a woman who's turned her house and family into a madhouse of disorder. The antic style of humor that's Nielsen trademark is here more outrageously frantic than antic. And Taylor Mac's venture into a "regular play" is obviously intriguing enough for theater goers to buy enough tickets for this limited run to have extended for a week before HIR's official opening.

The night I went to Playwrights Horizons' Peter Sharp Theater, the elevator was on the blink. It turned out that all the money spent on PH's beautiful current home didn't allow for a freight or other emergency elevator (isn't that some sort of fire hazard?) And so I climbed to the fourth floor venue (which is really the sixthth floor) hoping HIR would be as fresh and cleverly subversive as the advance promotional material promised.

The good news first: HIR is a wildly ambitious attempt to create a cohesive whole out of a merger of issues: the effect of continued downward mobility for bottom-of-the-economic heap Americans, and the fallout of domestic abuse and changes in gender identity within such families.

Kristine Nielsen certainly carries off the absurdist style Mac has chosen to portray his decidedly dysfuntional family. Nielsen's Paige is the central character — a housewife and mother in a depressingly more Americam Nightmare than American Dream who's used her abusive husband's stroke and new attitudes about gender identity to break free from caring for him and the drudgery of maintaining a house that was never a home.

Daniel Oreskes, a seasoned actor often playing Shakespearian roles, is remarkable as the husband she's now emasculating. Cameron Scoggins is aptly distraught as Isaac, the returning Marine who finds his home as disturbingly hellish as the war zone in Afghanistan he just left. Besides the physical mess to make him upchuck repeatedly, there's the state his father Arnold and sister Maxine. Dad talks in blubbering monosyllables and is bizarrely attired in a dress and wig; sister Maxine (Tom Phelan) midway into transgendering into brother Max.

The not so good news: The over-the-top style Mac has chosen to introduce us to this uber dysfunctional family is certainly apt. Unfortunately it's not consistently edgy and clearly deetailed enough to make HIR as momentously deep and far-reaching a deconstruction of conventional family dramas as it wants to be. The look at inexpensive starter houses which, unlike the post World War II Levittown houses, never had the potential to seed solid communities loses impact when combined with the transgender pronoun issues from which the play takes its title.

Max's seeing himself as neither he or she or him but "hir" and his mother's monologues on her new gender semantic vocabularly and self-empowerment are funny. The problem is that the whole concept fizzles in the depressingly dark and essentially go-nowhere second act.

I suspect that both the playwright and director Niegel Smith expect both the reason for Isaac's dishonorable discharge and the change in scenery between the first and second act to be truly surprising. But while Isaac's dismissal is not exactly what's expected, the post intermission shift in David Zinn's set is as predictable as the announcements and actions that will send Isaac back to the kitchen sink to throw up again and again.

In the end this look at a family that has, as Isaac puts it, become homeless in their own home, is more tragic than funny. It left me wishing Taylor Mac had been able to fully realize his key theme: that liberating oneself from imprisoning life styles doesn't doesn't mean you' get out of jail really free.
HIR by Taylor Mac
Directed By Niegel Smith
Cast: Kristine Nielsen (Paige), Daniel Oreskes (Arnold), Tom Phelan (Max) and Cameron Scoggins (Isaac)
Sets: David Zinn
Costumes:Gabriel Berry
Lighting: Mike Inwood
Sound: Fitz Patton
Stage Manager: Stephen Milosevich
Running Time: 1 hour and 50 minutes, including one intermission
Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theater 416 West 42nd Street
From 10/16/15; opening 11/08/15; closing 1/03/16
Tuesdays through Fridays at 7:30 PM, Saturdays at 2 & 7:30 PM and Sundays at 2 & 7PM.
Reviewed by Elyse Sommer at November 5th press preview
REVIEW FEEDBACK
Highlight one of the responses below and click "copy" or"CTRL+C"
  • I agree with the review of HIR
  • I disagree with the review of HIR
  • The review made me eager to see HIR
Click on the address link E-mail: esommer@curtainup.com
Paste the highlighted text into the subject line (CTRL+ V):

Feel free to add detailed comments in the body of the email. . .also the names and emails of any friends to whom you'd like us to forward a copy of this review.

For a feed to reviews and features as they are posted add http://curtainupnewlinks.blogspot.com to your reader
Curtainup at Facebook . . . Curtainup at Twitter
Subscribe to our FREE email updates: E-mail: esommer@curtainup.comesommer@curtainup.com
put SUBSCRIBE CURTAINUP EMAIL UPDATE in the subject line and your full name and email address in the body of the message. If you can spare a minute, tell us how you came to CurtainUp and from what part of the country.
Slings & Arrows  cover of  new Blu-Ray cover
Slings & Arrows- view 1st episode free




Book Of Mormon MP4 Book of Mormon -CD
Our review of the show
amazon




©Copyright 2015, Elyse Sommer.
Information from this site may not be reproduced in print or online without specific permission from esommer@curtainup.com