Theater: White Rabbit, Red Rabbit--amateurish Theater 101

There was considerable buzz in town over White Rabbit, Red Rabbit, written by Nassim Soleimanpour, a young Iranian playwright who was unable to travel out of Iran at the time he wrote the play.  The marketable gimmick is that the sole (famous) actor receives the script onstage immediately before the play begins, without (in theory) any prior preparation or word of what will happen. The "play" has been presented around the world in multiple languages, as at Edinburgh fringe. In this Manhattan run it plays each Monday night with a different actor or actress, and the roster is impressive, e.g. Nathan Lane, Gabriel Byrne, Martin Short, Whoopi Goldberg. The actor the night I went was Shohreh Aghdashloo, of film and TV fame. Why would she do this? She suggested that the challenge and concept were irresistible, and I suspect competitive ego enters the picture, too. 

The experience, while innovative, was sophomoric. There was much metaphysical posturing about the playwright's role, the audience role, the role of time and distance in how a playwright communicates with future audiences, etc.  Among the multiple themes touched on were suicide, governmental repression of the artist, and religious oppression.  Overall, there were too many ideas and too much deconstructionist folderol for me (soliloquies, extended audience participation and even the laborious exercise of every member of the audience counting off to label us each with a number...a depersonalization metaphor which might have worked well if there were 20 people, not so much with >200).  For Audience Member 51, it was honestly rather juvenile as if a college double theater- philosophy major was ruminating and wrote a play after a few writing courses. The vibe was of a repressed millenial play right trying too hard to communicate with the outside via his play (rather than Facebook and Twitter), laudable and rather sad, but not well constructed.

The actor has lots of opportunity to ad lib, comment on themes, and MC all the disparate elements on the fly. Perhaps a more glib actor like Nathan Lane pulled it off better than Ms. Aghdashloo, who seemed nervous, but I think it's largely a failed concept. As I left the theater, with the actress possibly dead in front (a ham-handed metaphor, sillier than profound), I could not really decide whether had just attended a Bernie Sanders rally (applause for everything anyone did), a Theater 101 class, or a bad encounter group. Quite a mess.