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Photo by Don Kellogg

Monday, February 21, 2011

Invasion!

Get your wallet out now. Pull out $30 bucks and fork it over for a ticket to the box office at Walkerspace for the powerhouse Swedish playwright Jonas Hassen Khemiri's US debut of Invasion!  Ask no more questions.  Do not hesitate.  This is without a doubt one of the best plays I have seen this entire season - and that includes Broadway, off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway. It's an extremely intelligent, linguistically complex, politically charged, attention grabbing, rapid-fire tour-de force for each of its 75 sharply written, cunningly directed, and superbly acted and deliciously well received minutes.

Each of the four young actors - Francis Benhamou, Andrew Guilarte, Bobby Moreno, and Debargo Sanyal (known only as Actors A, B, C and D) performs at full throttle the entire evening - never missing a beat or a word or a queue.  Emotions run the gamut from scene to scene but the pace is relentlessly and purposefully quick.  Scene changes are executed with precision and aplomb  By the time you reach the end, you find yourself at the beginning again.

I won't pretend to understand everything the playwright had to say.  There was too much there for my brain to have absorbed every layer, every overt or subversive gesture, word and idea.  Hours after the play ends and you're sitting at TriBeCa Bread enjoying your 3rd Manhattan, a new meaning or the nuance of a scene will reveal itself to you.  This, I promise.  Everything may not be as it seems.  Don't believe everything they tell you.  Open your eyes and think for yourself.  Think.  Period.