Maia Novi’s “Invasive Species” is being marketed as an outrageous darkish comedy, nevertheless it’s a quieter play than that: about being an Argentine immigrant with Hollywood ambitions, a graduate performing scholar at Yale and a psychiatric inpatient affected by intrusive ideas.
“My title is Maia,” the play’s central character (Novi) tells the viewers close to the highest of the present. “And it is a true story.”
Nicely, true-ish, provided that we’ve simply seen her get bitten by the Performing Bug (Julian Sanchez), a human-size creature with an enormous proboscis whose technique of infecting Maia entails spitting voluptuously onto her face from above. A little bit of hallucinatory license, then, has typically been taken.
Directed by Michael Breslin on the Winery’s Dimson Theater, the play fragments into totally different worlds. Essentially the most life like is the hospital in New Haven the place Maia wakes up, in March 2022, to search out she is a affected person — admitted to a youngsters’s ward, the place suicide is a temptation for a few of the adolescent sufferers.
The play’s different worlds are extra heightened and satirical, although they, too, have the whiff of veracity: the drama college, the place a trainer says that Maia — attempting to lose her accent by diligently imitating Gwyneth Paltrow — has a “lazy tongue”; the Connecticut relationship scene, the place a dimwitted American bro swallows each stereotype-laced lie that Maia concocts, prankishly, about her household in Argentina; a movie set the place a British director who casts her as Eva Perón has a blithely wrongheaded sense of authenticity.
Partially impressed by the 1977 manufacturing of Spalding Grey’s theater piece “Rumstick Highway,” an investigation into his mom’s suicide, “Invasive Species” carries the thrum of worry that may accompany a household historical past of psychological sickness. Maia worries — so does her father — about what she might need inherited from her personal mom.
Introduced by a gaggle of producers who embody the playwright-provocateur Jeremy O. Harris (“Slave Play”), Breslin’s roommate once they studied drama at Yale, “Invasive Species” is crisply directed on an almost naked stage. The supporting forged members (who embody Raffi Donatich, Sam Gonzalez and Alexandra Maurice) are quicksilver-changeable of their a number of roles, and it’s all the time clear which actuality or unreality the characters have stepped into, even when worlds overlap. (Yichen Zhou’s lighting is instrumental in that.)
It is a nicely acted, neatly assembled, rigorously modulated play with a cumulative drive that’s lower than it might need been. The satire — of drama college, of xenophobia — isn’t the freshest, and the obliqueness of the hospital strand softens its impression, and in the end the play’s.
“Invasive Species” is a portrait of a younger lady trying, for the sake of ambition and survival, to drive herself into varied molds that don’t match who she really is.
“Faux,” one of many teenage sufferers advises her, virtually. “You ought to be good at that — you’re an actress, proper?”
Invasive Species
Via June 30 on the Winery Theater, Manhattan; invasivespeciesplay.com. Working time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
