Draw the Circle Play Summary
Review: In 'Draw the Circle,' a Girl Becomes a Man
- Draw the Circle
- Off Broadway, Play , Solo Performance
- Closing Date:
- Rattlestick Theater, 224 Waverly Pl.
- 866-811-4111
An autobiographical meditation on identity and presence, Mashuq Mushtaq Deen's solo testify, "Describe the Circle," is the story of a suburban girl named Shireen and a Brooklyn man named Deen. They are the aforementioned person. And still they are not.
In a serial of monologues, sometimes gentle and sometimes harrowing, family members, lovers and others tell united states about Shireen'southward growing unhappiness — the disorientation, the hospitalizations, the suicide attempts — and gradual recovery, which culminates in her condign Deen through a gender transition. Neither Shireen nor Deen ever appears as a character.
"Draw the Circle," which runs in repertory at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater with Dael Orlandersmith's "Until the Flood," opens with a moving picture of a smiling girl in a red sweater, an image that fades as Mr. Deen, wearing jeans and a rumpled T-shirt, enters, stepping into the first of a number of lit squares.
A few days before Thanksgiving, Deen'southward girlfriend, Molly, is heading to Connecticut with Deen to meet his parents, Indian immigrants who struggle to accept them. "We oasis't seen them in 2 years," Molly explains. "It's like I've got to prove myself all again. Yes, I'm white. No, I'm non Muslim. Yes, I'm a daughter." Deen has even more than to prove.
The play jumps back and forth in time, from Shireen's adolescence and early on adulthood to Molly's traffic-plagued drive to New England. Mr. Deen plays all the characters. These men and women approach Shireen's, then Deen's, ache with as much sympathy as they tin can muster. Oft, information technology's not a lot.
Deen's mother doesn't desire to discuss his new identity. "Whatever it is, don't tell me," she says. "I can't handle it. Any it is y'all accept to do, please, tin can't y'all just wait until we're expressionless and gone?"
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Even Molly, who sometimes misses Shireen, has moments of anger. "He has hair everywhere," she says. "He changed. Because people refused to run across him. Peradventure he would have stayed a butch if they had merely used the freakin' pronoun he asked them to employ!"
Mr. Deen, a member of New Dramatists, joins an increasing number of transgender playwrights, like Basil Kreimendahl and Jess Barbagallo. Bald, disguised and baby-faced, he is a winning presence, and he soon engages the audience with the problems of his characters. While regressive legislation near restroom apply and an attempted ban of transgender military machine recruits suggest the fear and suspicion that transgender and gender-fluid people experience, the Rattlestick audition was primed for engagement.
At the Sunday dark functioning I saw, the oversupply was domicile-game friendly, laughing and cheering and urging Mr. Deen back onstage for multiple bows, which sometimes made "Draw the Circumvolve" feel less like a play and more similar an eloquent meet group.
Equally a document of Mr. Deen'south pain and a plea for visibility, it is persuasive. If you tin watch information technology without feeling compassion, run across your cardiologist. But as a work of art, it'southward less disarming.
Nether Chay Yew's efficient, unobtrusive direction, Mr. Deen is no shaman. Audience distractions rattle him, and unlike solo performers like Anna Deavere Smith, Sarah Jones, Danny Hoch or Ms. Orlandersmith, his characters never come fully live. He doesn't notwithstanding have the gift for defining a person with a posture, a gesture or a linguistic tic, and his accents tend to travel.
Likewise not fully present: Deen himself. Plainly, that's a choice braided into the Deoxyribonucleic acid of "Describe the Circle." Mr. Deen has opted to trace his journey through the eyes of onlookers. But past focusing so narrowly on gender, he provides a very limited self-portrait.
Of form, a gender transition — such a central modify in identity — is fascinating. But I tin't believe that it's the merely fascinating thing most Mr. Deen. A plan annotation mentions that he is an activist and "a man of many hobbies, including staff of life baker, monster-maker and educatee of the classical guitar and tin whistle." I wanted to encounter that guy — the artist, the activist, the good baker and the lousy musician. (I mean, tin can anyone really master the tin can whistle?)
In making a play nearly himself, Mr. Deen should draw the circle wider.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/theater/draw-the-circle-review-mashuq-mushtaq-deen.html#:~:text=An%20autobiographical%20meditation%20on%20identity,And%20yet%20they%20are%20not.
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