Practice
Nazareth Hassan
Playwrights Horizons
October 30–December 7, 2025
New York
Vulnerability. Respect. Honesty. Rigor. Curiosity. These are the characters’ community agreements that set the tone in Practice, a new dark comedy by Nazareth Hassan, directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant. The play, now showing at Playwrights Horizons through December 7, follows a company of ambitious actors starring in the latest work by the buzzy Asa Leon (Ronald Peet)— a hotshot theater director. Eager to please, the actors come up with these house rules with trepidacious smiles on their first night in an old Brooklyn church-turned-theater, where they have agreed to cohabitate for experimental, live-in rehearsals.
My mind wanders to the tenets I have committed to while sitting in liberal arts classrooms, practicing yoga, or dancing in queer nightlife venues. It’s these kinds of well-intentioned collective doctrines, often colored with descriptors that anyone can get behind, that sprout ideologies—belief systems that when dictated by the right charismatic leader can be wielded to oppress and manipulate. Practice is a witty portrait of such abuse of power, written like a familiar cautionary tale. Much like the teacher who leads with tough love, or the coach who inspires with mind games, Asa, the zealous director, is an archetype for a leader hungry to control. Meanwhile, his obsequious cast reveals just how easy it is to fall prey to groupthink when baited with the promise of inclusion.
It’s this gnawing desire to belong—but, also, to make it—that strips an otherwise eclectic cast of characters of their personal agency throughout their time together. Yet the descent into uniformity is a gradual one. Hassan builds psychological friction through the unsettlingly intimate demands of the medium of theater itself, staged via a repertoire of rigorous group activities. From dusk til dawn, the company participates in collective runs, meditation circles, and personal storytelling sessions that blur together across repetitive scenes. Each actor is due for a moment in the hot seat, ramping up the tension throughout training as Asa zeroes in on each cast member’s darkest moments, one by one. It is not until Angelique (Maya Margarita) refuses to share—and faces the consequences for doing so—that I begin to experience emotional whiplash. Are these raw confessions really conventional drama school exercises? They feel more like curated humiliation rituals and Asa, who wears a wry smile throughout, might just have a serious humiliation kink. But perhaps this is what theater, or anything that we love so much we want to be “good” for, is all about—offering up our most vulnerable parts for the review, critique, and interrogation of others.
As spectators, we do not remain unscathed by the persistent scrutiny; we are obedient participants in Asa’s testy durational performance. After two long hours of observing the cast scrub themselves raw of their idiosyncrasies, we have been implicated. We have watched them replicate each other’s foundational trauma with the same flippancy that they would try on new pairs of sunglasses. And after intermission, they unveil the masterpiece that they have been fastidiously training for. Self Awareness Exercise 001 is an operatic play about the actors themselves, premiering in an avant-garde theater in Berlin that’s reminiscent of the city’s notorious Volksbühne Theater. Afsoon Pajoufar’s eerily meta set is designed for fishbowl viewership—like test subjects, we watch the cast behind one-sided glass—we can see them, but they can’t see us.