IT’S NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE & KARA & EMMA & BARBARA & MIRANDA — Review Roundup

When one of the dual protagonists of It’s Not What It Looks Like announces that, “Dropping a piano on someone is not as simple as it seems,” you may assume they are speaking figuratively. 

Not even a little bit. John Collins’ wacky yet engrossing two-hander presents the panicked testimony of two GenZ-ers explaining why a mysterious accident is, despite appearances, definitely “not what it looks like.” (Just ignore those blood stains on their shirts.)

The gruesome incident in question? Exactly what was advertised – the pair, who are cousins, just accidentally dropped a piano on someone. Questions of who, why and how are gradually unraveled in Collins’ twisted comedy, which he performs alongside Chesney Mitchell in Vincent DeGeorge’s swift-footed, barebone staging, now at SoHo Playhouse through August 10. 

Collins’ work won the SoHo Playhouse Lighthouse Series in 2023, a prize which first set Max Wolf Friedlich’s Job on its unlikely journey to Broadway. Like Friedlich’s play, It’s Not What It Looks Like is structured as a thriller but finds more success as a meditation on detached, confused young people adrift in an overstimulating information age. If the play never quite gets under your skin, its acid wit does help make up for the many dramatic contrivances. 

At times, it seems Collins’ primary aim is to unsettle, a goal that sits oddly with the show’s silly premise. On this front, the play is rarely successful. To observe that even ordinary, good-hearted people can wander down violent paths is not exactly the stuff of revelation. 

The text is far more effective when it leans into its own ridiculousness. Along their way to piano-based disaster, our central duo (left unnamed) convince themselves of increasingly absurd notions as they try to make sense of their world. The specifics of how these delusions lead them to blood-soaked mayhem are, for the most part, silly. But the delusions themselves are both sadly hilarious and, in a time of increasing mass delirium, depressingly familiar.

——————

A formative play in my New York theatergoing education was Ariel Stess’s Heartbreak, an off-kilter, wonderfully bizarre work which The Bushwick Starr staged in 2015. A disciple of Mac Wellman, Stess’s plays are strange, plotless reveries, unmoored from reality yet striking at our deepest agonies with painful insight. 

Heartbreak added an additional layer of strangeness by having its characters speak in a mix of made-up words and backward sentences (“I’ve said what I meant”). The vocabulary of Stess’s new play Kara & Emma & Barbara & Miranda (at The Tank through August 17, in collaboration with New Georges) is more familiar. But here, language overwhelms in a different way: the four female protagonists deliver a frenzy of internal monologues, hurled breathlessly at the audience as we struggle to keep up. 

The challenge and thrill of Stess’s work lies in adjusting the ear to a wild new theatrical language. Here, Meghan Finn’s production doesn’t always help. The staging is so bare, the signposts so minimal, it takes a good 30-40 minutes to find one’s bearings in place and time.

But once the play settles into a clear rhythm – four interconnected women, trading off stream-of-consciousness confessions – the language soars, anchored by four exemplary performances from Kallan Dana, Megan Emery Gaffney, Zoë Geltman and Colleen Werthmann.  And watching these extraordinary actresses take turns abusing their fifth cast member Paul Ketchum (who alternates as useless men in each of their lives) is a true comic pleasure.