Get the latest gossip
Crimes and Chases: the beautiful land i seek and RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR
Two travel tales leading into the American nightmare.
There’s plenty of trippiness to revel in, but Zayas plays things straight: Eamonn Farrell’s overly illustrative projections give us literal photographic backgrounds splashed across the set to make sure we’re clear on each of the visitations (upper West Side fire escapes for Maria, a Law & Order courtroom when an FBI agent shows up). RACECAR treads a fine line — as we learn more truths about its protagonists, about the addiction they share and the chaos they’ve wreaked on the people in their lives, the play weaves dangerously close to psychological neatness, the kind typified by simplistic trauma narratives that say, conclusively, “this happened to me when I was young, and so I am broken in this particular way.” But Dana’s writing is trippy enough, and Blush keeps things heightened and unsentimental enough, that the pair avoid the cliff. McKenzie and Greer are both great with the text’s herky-jerky rhythms, its upswings into grinning, anxious mania and its nosedives into the ugly and eerie, and Canó-Flaviá and Frey find depth of feeling in a sequence in which they embody Daughter’s estranged sisters while still remaining puckish inhabitants of the play’s tilted dream world.
Or read this on VULTURE