Marcus Scott

Theater review by Marcus Scott As a subject in American mass culture, cults have moved well beyond a cult following. They are hard to escape these days, whether in horror films—from Hereditary and Midsommar to more off-angle offerings like The Menu, Opus and Him—or in the realm of nonfiction, where real-world sects like the Zizians, NXIVM and the cult of Mother God have fueled documentaries, exposés and bestsellers. And now contemporary theater is finally catching up to the Zeitgeist with Nazareth Hassan’s Practice, an incantatory deep dive into the sociologies of performance that is as disturbing as it is riveting. Expertly directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, with electrifying movement by Camden Gonzalez and an extraordinary ensemble cast, the play’s world premiere at Playwrights Horizons conjures a theatrical experience in which the line between artistic rigor and psychic violation is perilously thin. Practice | Photograph: Courtesy Alexander Mejía In the play’s opening scene, a study in human pliancy, seven young performers stand on a bare stage, auditioning with the same monologue. With each take, they absorb direction unquestioningly: bending without breaking, desperate to prove themselves to a gaze they cannot see. The disembodied voice dispensing notes from the aptly named “God mic” belongs to Asa Leon (Ronald Peet), a critically acclaimed auteur whose MacArthur “genius” grant—“Not that I would label myself as a genius,” he protests coquettishly—has enabled him to con

Theater review by Marcus Scott History is never inert, as the Belfast playwright Leo McGann reminds us in The Honey Trap: It metastasizes across decades, reshaping itself through recollection, omission and remorse. In McGann’s unnerving and meticulously crafted political thriller, what begins as a deceptively simple interview between a graduate student and a veteran soldier unfolds into a labyrinthine meditation on the perilous seductions of remembrance.  Emily (Molly Ranson), an Irish-American PhD candidate compiling oral histories of the Troubles, meets Dave (Michael Hayden), a British military veteran formerly stationed in Northern Ireland. With academic equanimity, dictaphone in hand, Emily is intent on recording his story in pursuit of truth and reconciliation—which, she argues, Northern Ireland has never fully embraced, leaving old wounds to fester. Dave, gruff and cagey, counters that only his account is the truth, because the IRA is incapable of it.  The Honey Trap | Photograph: Courtesy Carol Rosegg Flashback to Belfast, 1979: Young Dave (Daniel Marconi), brimming with mercurial mischief, stumbles through boisterous drinking games with his affable comrade Bobby (Harrison Tipping). Two local women—Kirsty (Doireann Mac Mahon) and Lisa (Annabelle Zasowski)—enter the bar, the young men dial up the flirtation and a night of bawdy comedy spirals into catastrophe: Bobby is lured away and murdered, leaving Dave seared with lifelong guilt. More than three decades later, Dave

James Ijames won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Fat Ham, an irreverent riff on William Shakespeare’s Hamlet that feels like a call to arms for Black joy and queer representation. A jambalaya of satire, magical realism and the American domestic sitcom, the play follows Juicy (Marcel Spears), a morose online-college student, as he tries to come to terms with the marriage of his newly-widowed mother, Tedra (Nikki Crawford), to his Machiavellian uncle Rev (Billy Eugene Jones). “This ain’t Shakespeare,” Ijames noted in the show’s program. “Don’t get me wrong. I love Shakespeare, this just ain’t him. This ain’t a tragedy…This play is offering tenderness next to softness as a practice of living. This play is celebrating Blackness that is traditional and weird and lonely and happy and grieving and honest and frightened and brave and sexy and churchified and liberated and poetic.” RECOMMENDED: Review: Fat Ham (★★★★★) Fat Ham had its world premiere in the spring of 2021 in a digital production by Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater. A year later, it made its onstage debut at the Public Theater, directed by Saheem Ali, and became one of the buzziest plays of the season. On March 21, 2023, that production will begin a limited run at Broadway’s American Airlines Theatre. We chatted over FaceTime with the playwright as he prepared to step into rehearsals.   Fat Ham moves Hamlet from a medieval Danish castle to a modern-day cookout in North Carolina. Why a barbecue? “Barbecues are cumulativ

Marcus Scott is a New York City–based playwright, musical writer, opera librettist and journalist. He has contributed to Elle, Essence, Out, American Theatre, Uptown, Trace, Madame Noire and Playbill, among other publications.Follow Marcus: Instagram, Twitter We’re in the chrysalis of a new age of theatrical storytelling, and Black queer voices have been at the center of this transformation. Stepping out of the margins of society to push against the status quo, Black LGBTQ+ artists  have been actively engaged in fighting anti-blackness, racial disparities, disenfranchisement, homophobia and transphobia. The success of Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play, Donja R. Love’s one in two and Jordan E. Cooper’s Ain’t No Mo’—not to mention Michael R. Jackson’s tour de force, the Pulitzer Prize–winning metamusical A Strange Loop—made that phenomenon especially visible last season. But these artists are far from alone. Because the intersection of queerness and Blackness is complex—with various gender expressions, sexual identifiers and communities taking shape in different spaces—Black LGBTQ+ artists are anything but a monolith. George C. Wolfe, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Robert O’Hara, Harrison David Rivers, Staceyann Chin, Colman Domingo, Tracey Scott Wilson, Tanya Barfield, Marcus Gardley and Daniel Alexander Jones are just some of the many Black queer writers who have already made marks.  With New York stages dark for the foreseeable future, we can’t know when we will