Nassim Review of Nassim, a play by Nassim Soleimanpour

 

Nassim

Review of Nassim, a play by Nassim Soleimanpour

At the Calderwood Pavilion of the Huntington Theatre through October 27, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

Nassim, currently playing at the Calderwood Pavilion and presented by the Huntington Theatre, defies all expectation of a theatrical experience. It features a new co-star every performance, and that co-star has not seen the script prior to the start of the show. As the play begins, we see the featured performer struggle to gain his or her footing as they attempt to act out a play about which they know almost nothing, cold-reading their lines projected on a screen behind them. The audience instantly sympathizes with the performer as the script they read pokes fun at stage conventions. On the night I saw the production, Armando Rivera, the Puerto Rico-born Co-Artistic Director of Teatro Chelsea gamely kept up with the process, even when the text on the screen appeared in Italics, as stage directions typically do. He boldly faced the challenge of talking to the audience while glancing back at the screen for his lines. A pair of hands sometimes appear with the lines, changing the words or forcing an emphasis the performer elides. About 20 minutes into the play, we learn that those hands belong to the playwright himself, Nassim Soleimanpour.

Soleimenpour has a fascinating story to tell in this autobiographical play. Born in Iran, Soleimenpour cannot produce his plays in his repressive home country. Living now in Berlin, the playwright feels always disoriented, writing in his native Farsi for audiences that will not understand him and then translating the script to perform elsewhere. As a result, NASSIM deals with language and the ways in which language both divides people and brings them together. Soleimanpour has gathered many languages on tour with his plays. He lives in Germany now, and seems largely fluent in English, though he speaks little. In the almost 500 performances of NASSIM, he has gathered words from around the world, which he shows the audience in the journal he keeps of words contributed by the audiences and defined by the performers. Through his “new best friend” – the performance’s special guest – Nassim and NASSIM reach a remarkable plateau of feeling and insight. And as you might expect, if you attend NASSIM, you might have the opportunity to learn some Farsi – onstage, in front of a supportive audience.

I would like to take this opportunity to praise Loretta Greco, the Huntington’s Artistic Director, who has shaken awake the somewhat staid old-guard company with a stunning and excellent line-up of inventive productions. And she has transformed the Boston theater scene not only through the Huntington Theatre’s annual schedule, but also through her policy of partnering with small theaters in the city, most particularly with African-American companies like the Front Porch Arts Collective. Under Greco, The Huntington will present Mfoniso Udofia’s multi-play cycle about a Nigerian American family. Efforts like this have opened up theater in the city, making it a truly a cultural institution for all of the region’s cultures. NASSIM carries this attitude forward with charm. Greco has the knack of staging shows that push the theatrical envelope while embracing the audience. Having sat through adventuresome but painful and destructive seasons at theaters elsewhere, I wish to give Greco unstinting praise for embracing the new without alienating traditional theater fans. It’s been a remarkable growth to watch. I hope the Huntington can keep Greco in Boston for a good long time.

NASSIM has an entertaining line-up of performers scheduled for its run, including Mfoniso Udofia, Tony Shalhoub, Jared Bowen, Keith Lockhart, and Imari Paris Jeffries. Every night will bring a different performance of the same play as these public figures and sometimes actors play with Nassim Soleimenpour’s script. Bringing in community leaders to perform makes NASSIM a bit of a gimmick, a gimmick that Soleimanpour used previously in his 2011 WHITE RABBIT RED RABBIT. But just because it’s a gimmick does not mean that it is easy to do or that it isn’t effective. My party left the theater feeling more connected to the world, and we can all use that feeling, however we acquire it.

Toni Stone Review of Toni Stone, a play by Lydia R. Diamond

 

Toni Stone

Review of Toni Stone, a play by Lydia R. Diamond

At the Huntington Theatre through June 16, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

In Toni Stone, the Huntington Theater has an exhilarating show to close out the season. Filled with dance, music, drama and laughs, this story of the first female professional baseball player on a male team simultaneously lifts the spirits of the audience and explores the ways that identity defines our possible lives. As a black woman, Toni couldn’t play in the women’s professional league memorialized in A League of Their Own. Instead, she signed with a variety of semi-pro teams before landing on the roster of the Indianapolis Clowns, replacing Hank Aaron at second base for the 1953 season. This rousing production at the Huntington Theatre brought the audience to its feet, closing out Artistic Director Loretta Greco’s glorious first season at the helm. An evening at Toni Stone produces all the joy and satisfaction of an exquisite day at the ballpark.

The play focuses on the single season Stone spent in the league, hired at least in part as novelty to sell tickets. The Negro League played excellent baseball, with enormous talents like Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, and Hank Aaron in the line-ups before Major League Baseball welcomed African Americans, but the owners saw the games – both within the league and the unofficial exhibition games with white teams, often rigged so the white teams would win – as entertainment as much as sport. If you think of the Harlem Globetrotters as the framework, you’ll get the idea. In this context, Toni’s ground-breaking season seems more showmanship than athletic accomplishment. Though Toni Stone was an extraordinary athlete, distinguishing herself in track, figure-skating, and gymnastics before settling on baseball, the league owners secretly agreed to pitch hittable balls to her to satisfy the audience. Whether for that reason or another, Stone stepped back from professional baseball after playing a year with the Clowns.

In the context of the play, however, this performative emphasis in her presence on the field brings meaning to the production. Diamond, who both wrote and directed the play, leaves Jennifer Mogbock, who plays Toni marvelously, as the only woman on the stage. Men play the other women, just as the Black actors play the white team owners and the disgruntled fans when Toni and her teammates refuse to throw a game to the white exhibition opposition and the boys

learning the game. Toni Stone explores the degree to which gender, race, and sexuality can become purely matters of performance rather than matters of fact. Having a woman play professional baseball calls into question all the assumptions about how socially constructed identities become stand-ins for the reality we share. It’s a testimony to this production that the profundities of the script never bog down the show, just as the extraordinary fact of a woman in professional baseball doesn’t alter the basic facts of baseball’s nine innings and three outs. The show zips along even as it invites the audience to uncover the essence beneath the performance.

The play – and Mogbock’s performance – also reveals the painful conflicts Toni experiences as she breaks cultural norms. Toni never feels at ease or at home on the baseball field, even though the sport represents her true love. Whenever she comes up against the social tensions her boundary-busting position imposes on her, she pulls out a pack of baseball cards from her pocket and begins reciting statistics as a way to remind her of what she’s doing. Her character finds a balance in teammate Spec, played by Omar Robinson, who reads between at bats and quotes the Ancestors – especially Harriet Tubman and W.E.B. DuBois – throughout the play. The set and the cast shift endlessly as new characters enter and exit, played by Toni’s teammates. The stands form the backdrop onstage becomes the bus the players travel on, the whorehouse where they’re sometimes forced to sleep, the bar where Toni meets Alberga, with whom she forms a relationship, and a variety of other performance spaces. The elasticity of the set and the cast reflects the elasticity of the game, which remains baseball no matter who plays it. Toni Stone caps a promising initial season with Lorretta Greco at the artistic helm of the Huntington, balancing crowd-pleasing and challenging productions such as Prayer for the French Republic, John Proctor Is The Villain, and The Band’s Visit. The Huntington Theatre finds itself in sure hands, and next season promises to be every bit as good as Toni Stone.