Draw the Circle Play Pdf
Review: In 'Depict the Circumvolve,' a Girl Becomes a Man
- Draw the Circumvolve
- 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'south solo show, "Describe the Circle," is the story of a suburban girl named Shireen and a Brooklyn human being named Deen. They are the same person. And still they are non.
In a series of monologues, sometimes gentle and sometimes harrowing, family unit members, lovers and others tell us nearly Shireen's growing unhappiness — the disorientation, the hospitalizations, the suicide attempts — and gradual recovery, which culminates in her becoming Deen through a gender transition. Neither Shireen nor Deen e'er appears as a character.
"Depict the Circle," which runs in repertory at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater with Dael Orlandersmith's "Until the Flood," opens with a movie of a smiling daughter in a red sweater, an image that fades every bit 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'south girlfriend, Molly, is heading to Connecticut with Deen to see his parents, Indian immigrants who struggle to accept them. "We haven't seen them in two years," Molly explains. "It's like I've got to prove myself all once more. Yes, I'one thousand white. No, I'1000 not Muslim. Yes, I'yard a girl." Deen has even more than to prove.
The play jumps dorsum and forth in fourth dimension, 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'due south, and so Deen's, anguish with as much sympathy equally they can muster. Often, it's not a lot.
Deen'due south mother doesn't want to discuss his new identity. "Whatever it is, don't tell me," she says. "I tin't handle it. Whatsoever it is you lot have to practise, please, can't you only await until nosotros're expressionless and gone?"
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Fifty-fifty Molly, who sometimes misses Shireen, has moments of anger. "He has hair everywhere," she says. "He changed. Considering people refused to encounter him. Maybe he would have stayed a butch if they had just used the freakin' pronoun he asked them to use!"
Mr. Deen, a member of New Dramatists, joins an increasing number of transgender playwrights, like Basil Kreimendahl and Jess Barbagallo. Bald, bearded and infant-faced, he is a winning presence, and he before long engages the audience with the bug of his characters. While regressive legislation near restroom use and an attempted ban of transgender military recruits propose the fear and suspicion that transgender and gender-fluid people feel, the Rattlestick audience was primed for engagement.
At the Sunday night performance I saw, the crowd was home-game friendly, laughing and auspicious and urging Mr. Deen back onstage for multiple bows, which sometimes fabricated "Describe the Circle" experience less similar a play and more similar an eloquent encounter grouping.
As a document of Mr. Deen's pain and a plea for visibility, it is persuasive. If you can watch it without feeling compassion, see your cardiologist. But every bit a work of art, information technology's less convincing.
Under Chay Yew'due south efficient, unobtrusive direction, Mr. Deen is no shaman. Audition distractions rattle him, and unlike solo performers like Anna Deavere Smith, Sarah Jones, Danny Hoch or Ms. Orlandersmith, his characters never come up fully alive. He doesn't yet have the gift for defining a person with a posture, a gesture or a linguistic tic, and his accents tend to travel.
Too non fully present: Deen himself. Plainly, that'south a pick braided into the DNA of "Draw the Circle." Mr. Deen has opted to trace his journey through the eyes of onlookers. Only by focusing so narrowly on gender, he provides a very limited self-portrait.
Of class, a gender transition — such a fundamental change in identity — is fascinating. But I can't believe that it's the only fascinating thing about Mr. Deen. A program note mentions that he is an activist and "a human being of many hobbies, including bread baker, monster-maker and student of the classical guitar and tin whistle." I wanted to meet that guy — the artist, the activist, the good baker and the lousy musician. (I mean, can anyone really master the tin whistle?)
In making a play about himself, Mr. Deen should draw the circumvolve wider.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/theater/draw-the-circle-review-mashuq-mushtaq-deen.html
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