“Practice” doesn’t make perfect

Nazareth Hassan’s latest play, Practice, purports to give us a “view behind the curtain” of the ease with which totalitarianism takes over the minds, the hearts, the very souls of ordinary people. How it exploits the weaknesses in every person, holding out a promise of “salvation” through submission and “belonging” within a group. And all done with the willing — enthusiastic — cooperation of the followers, wrapped within the creation of a theatre piece.

But it is as over-written a polemic as some of the plays of George Bernard Shaw. It has characters as cliche as those found in old-fashioned melodrama and situations that are so obviously setups that even I was left wondering how any character could fail to see through them.

Even though one can try to make sense of what’s going on in Practice, even if one sees the dark shadows of modern-day cult leaders in its main protagonist, one ends up wondering if it is all worth spending time with people you wouldn’t want to be around in real life.

In Practice, we see noted director-playwright Asa Leon (Ronald Peet) assemble a troupe of seven actors: Ro (Opa Adeyemo), a black American male; Mel (Karina Curet), a white Chilean female; Savannah (Amanda Jahava), a black American female; Keeyon (Hayward Leach), a black American gay male; Angelique (Maya Margarita), a black American trans female; Rinni (Susannah Perkins), a white German female; and Tristan (Omar Shafiuzzaman), an Indian English male. With his set designer-lover Walton Rhodes (Mark Junek), who was once Asa’s teacher, and their emotionally needy assistant, Danny (Alex Wyse), who acts as a combination gofer, DJ, and surveillance chief — for there are cameras and microphones everywhere, recording everyone — Asa sets out to perform psychological and emotional games under the guise of creating his next artistic masterpiece. 

While Asa is ruthlessly obsessed with truthfulness, he is not ever truthful about himself; lying seems to be second nature with him. After pressuring his company to reveal what they see as their greatest flaws or failures, after finding out how well they could dissemble in a version of the game “Liars’ Club”, Asa exploits what he has learned about their weaknesses, as carefully recorded by the ever-faithful Danny.

It’s at this point that I began to wonder why none of the seven actors in Asa’s troupe filed charges against him with Actor’s Equity. Yes, the cliche of the emotionally abusive director pushing an actor to a breaking point / breakthrough is as old as the movie 42nd Street, but the playwright does not shed any new light on its use as a technique. All his characters are just straw men, each expressing a different emotion or intellectual point of view. As a play, Practice goes for drama without characters that could grip an audience; you just, after a while, don’t care about them. 

I had only once, in my theatre-going career, walked out of a play after the first act. With Practice, that count is now two. Perhaps those with stronger stomachs than I could sit through the two long hours of its first act (the rehearsal process) and stay for the extra hour of its second act (the performance). If you feel that this is you, by all means see Practice. I’m sure there are critical outlets out there who will acclaim this a masterpiece of playwriting. I am not one of them.

Practice is presented in the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre at Playwrights Horizons, 416 West 42nd St., in New York, through Dec. 7, 2025. For more information or to purchase tickets, go to playwrightshorizons.org.