Draw the Circle Book New
Review: In 'Describe the Circle,' a Daughter 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 evidence, "Draw the Circumvolve," is the story of a suburban girl named Shireen and a Brooklyn man named Deen. They are the same person. And however they are not.
In a series of monologues, sometimes gentle and sometimes harrowing, family unit members, lovers and others tell us well-nigh Shireen'due south 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 ever appears equally a character.
"Draw the Circumvolve," which runs in repertory at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater with Dael Orlandersmith's "Until the Flood," opens with a picture of a smiling girl in a red sweater, an image that fades equally 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'due south girlfriend, Molly, is heading to Connecticut with Deen to see his parents, Indian immigrants who struggle to take them. "Nosotros haven't seen them in two years," Molly explains. "Information technology's similar I've got to prove myself all over once more. Yes, I'k white. No, I'one thousand not Muslim. Yes, I'k a girl." Deen has even more than to show.
The play jumps back and forth in time, from Shireen'due south adolescence and early adulthood to Molly'southward traffic-plagued drive to New England. Mr. Deen plays all the characters. These men and women approach Shireen's, and then Deen'due south, ache with equally much sympathy every bit they tin can muster. Oftentimes, it's not a lot.
Deen's mother doesn't want to talk over his new identity. "Whatever it is, don't tell me," she says. "I can't handle it. Whatever it is you take to do, please, can't you lot just wait until we're dead 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 see him. Maybe he would take 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, similar Basil Kreimendahl and Jess Barbagallo. Bald, bearded and baby-faced, he is a winning presence, and he soon engages the audition with the issues of his characters. While regressive legislation about restroom use and an attempted ban of transgender military recruits propose the fear and suspicion that transgender and gender-fluid people experience, the Rattlestick audition was primed for appointment.
At the Sunday night functioning I saw, the crowd was habitation-game friendly, laughing and cheering and urging Mr. Deen back onstage for multiple bows, which sometimes made "Draw the Circle" experience less like a play and more like an eloquent encounter grouping.
As a document of Mr. Deen'south hurting and a plea for visibility, it is persuasive. If you can watch it without feeling compassion, see your cardiologist. Simply as a work of fine art, it's less convincing.
Under 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 alive. He doesn't all the same accept the gift for defining a person with a posture, a gesture or a linguistic tic, and his accents tend to travel.
Besides not fully present: Deen himself. Obviously, that's a pick braided into the DNA of "Depict the Circle." Mr. Deen has opted to trace his journeying through the eyes of onlookers. Just by focusing so narrowly on gender, he provides a very limited self-portrait.
Of course, a gender transition — such a cardinal change in identity — is fascinating. Merely I tin't believe that information technology'south the only fascinating thing about Mr. Deen. A plan note mentions that he is an activist and "a homo of many hobbies, including staff of life bakery, monster-maker and student 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 hateful, can anyone really master the tin can whistle?)
In making a play near 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
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