{"id":80487,"date":"2019-03-05T23:50:19","date_gmt":"2019-03-06T04:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.gayfriendschat.com\/socialblog\/alan-cumming-and-hari-nef-star-in-overflowing-daddy-off-broadway-review\/"},"modified":"2019-03-05T23:50:19","modified_gmt":"2019-03-06T04:50:19","slug":"alan-cumming-and-hari-nef-star-in-overflowing-daddy-off-broadway-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.gayfriendschat.com\/socialblog\/alan-cumming-and-hari-nef-star-in-overflowing-daddy-off-broadway-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Alan Cumming and Hari Nef Star in Overflowing \u2018Daddy\u2019 Off-Broadway: REVIEW"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alan Cumming and Hari Nef Star in Overflowing \u2018Daddy\u2019 Off-Broadway: REVIEW<\/b><\/p>\n

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Those seated in the front row of \u201cDaddy\u201d<\/em> should prepare to get wet. Yes, there is an actual swimming pool, set in front of a glassy, modernist house in the Hollywood hills, a David Hockney come to life. \u201cThis is our time,\u201d howls Hari Nef, playing a gallerist who represents a young Black artist. \u201cWe can be outlandish and brazen and unsafe and careless,\u201d she says. \u201cAll those things the big boys<\/a> have been able to be forever.\u201d She\u2019s referring to women<\/a>, people of color, and everyone else who\u2019s been shoved aside by those she mordantly calls<\/a> \u201cthe white cis het blowhard art bros of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, she\u2019s also talking about Jeremy O. Harris<\/a>, whose daring play overflows past the boundaries of convention just as water does from the pool on stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, where it opened off-Broadway tonight. An opulent joint production of The New Group and Vineyard Theatre directed by Danya Taymor, \u201cDaddy\u201d<\/em> (intentionally in quotes) turns inside-out the subconscious of an artist \u2014 young, Black, and queer \u2014 striving in a world built by and for aforementioned blowhards. <\/p>\n

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This by itself is like a gust of fresh air, considering how often Black experience<\/a> has recently been co-opted and packaged for consumption<\/a> by white creators<\/a>. And it\u2019s no surprise that the tangled contents of an artist\u2019s mind \u2014 tortured by inherited racial trauma, an absent father, a lapse of faith \u2014 should flood any single canvas. But ultimately the play quite literally cannot be contained. Though \u201cDaddy\u201d<\/em> is invigorating, provocative, and often wildly entertaining, audiences may be forgiven for eventually feeling lost, overwhelmed, and a vague urge to call<\/a> out for their own to take them home to bed. <\/p>\n

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The play, which Harris subtitles \u201ca melodrama,\u201d spills over in nearly every sense. (Clocking in close to three hours with two intermissions, time isn\u2019t the least of them.) That budding artist (played by Ronald Peet) and his elder patron and lover (Alan Cumming), whom we meet rolling on molly in the opening scene, frequently spill out of their clothes and into the pool. When the artist\u2019s roiling psyche breaches the confines of his imagination, the cast pulls out hand mics and breaks into George Michael\u2019s \u201cFather Figure.\u201d Did I mention there\u2019s a gospel choir? <\/p>\n

The artist moves in after that first night, seemingly another object in a collection. Cumming\u2019s character pet names him \u201cNaomi,\u201d as in Campbell, and takes to spanking him. The young man<\/a>\u2019s friends (played by Tommy Dorfman and Kahyun Kim) gather to gossip in the sun about their various adventures in sugar baby-ing. Like much of Harris\u2019 play, it\u2019s \u201cso L.A.\u201d as the three of them might say. But it\u2019s more than mere metaphor. We watch as the young artist becomes increasingly and curiously more childlike, sucking his patron\u2019s thumb, calling him \u201cdaddy,\u201d and regressing to impetuousness. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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For his first solo show, the artist constructs miniature dolls \u2014 what his mother (played by Charlayne Woodard) calls<\/a> \u201ccoon babies\u201d \u2014 finely dressed to please. When that exhibit sells out, he moves on to fashioning life-size fabrications of himself, his mom (who arrives, after several unanswered voicemails, to rescue him from the white devil, or \u201cmethuselah\u201d as she calls<\/a> him), and Cumming\u2019s wealthy collector, his adopted father figure. The puppets lend a macabre pageantry to Harris\u2019 drama in their theatrical use of material and form. As psychological art, they come to feel overdetermined. (The boy<\/a> started playing will dolls when his father abandoned the family.)<\/p>\n

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A surfeit of cunning insight \u2014 on art, sex<\/a>, power, faith, subjectivity, and coming of age from the margins, to name a few \u2014 is far more than one can reasonably expect from even the most established and revered playwrights in American theatre, much less one who\u2019s not yet out of graduate school. On that first euphoric night, Harris\u2019 young artist explains that his work \u201c[recontextualizes] what it means to be a Black man<\/a>.\u201d Harris aims to do far more than just that, as already evidenced by Slave Play<\/em>, his professional debut last fall. Fortunately for us, he\u2019s just getting started.<\/p>\n

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<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Follow Naveen Kumar on Twitter: @Mr_NaveenKumar<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

(photos: monique carboni)<\/p>\n

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The post Alan Cumming and Hari Nef Star in Overflowing \u2018Daddy\u2019 Off-Broadway: REVIEW<\/a> appeared first on Towleroad Gay News<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Alan Cumming and Hari Nef Star in Overflowing ‘Daddy’ Off-Broadway: REVIEW<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n