Paul Steinberg’s claustrophobic set design for Betty Shamieh’s The Black Eyed is about as perfect a representation of the playwright’s intention as any. Slathered in a shade of pink that fortunately isn’t too hot, it is a low-ceilinged enterprise that juts out well past New York Theatre Workshop’s proscenium arch. You almost feel the need to crouch as you sit down or at least bow your head. Meanwhile, the playing area is draconian: four rows of stadium-style, wooden seating placed so close to the lip of the stage that director Sam Gold has little choice but to limit his staging of the play’s four actresses to variations on standing still or left-right-left-right traffic patterns.
The scheme succeeds, in subtle but occasionally grating ways, because Shamieh has set The Black Eyed in the afterlife; the play is Sartre’s No Exit recapitulated for the age of terror. Aiesha (Aysan Celik) is on stage when we arrive, meditating or perhaps lamenting her loneliness in this harsh pink netherworld. She is—or was—a Palestinian suicide bomber. And while she insists to the three women who subsequently arrive that this existential way station is an outpost of heaven, the truth may very well be otherwise.
The back wall of Steinberg’s set remains incomplete, not quite connecting with that low ceiling, and it is from there that the three women enter: Delilah (Emily Swallow), the legendary biblical vamp who discovered the secret to Samson’s strength and betrayed him; Tamam (Lameece Issaq), brutally raped and victimized during the savage, bloodthirsty Dark Ages; and the Architect (Jeanine Serralles), who met her fate on one of the sacrificial airplanes of September 11, 2001. Each woman is also Palestinian; each has a desire to explode out of the confines of this pink-hued hell and enter a room, just within their sights, where the earth’s true martyrs gather. To walk in, Aiesha haughtily warns, is to take a breathtaking risk, for it is only she who has ever left as well as entered. It is up to us—and the other women—to intuit the reasons why.
We must also intuit Shamieh’s overall point. The fact that Aiesha both enters and leaves this martyrdom room clearly suggests that she, despite her earthly self-sacrifice, is not considered a true martyr; her failure to qualify for permanent admittance to the room is certainly what drives her anger toward, and mocking of, the other women, each of whom offers up a detailed back story, expressed in monologues and dialogues, that are much more emotionally wrenching than anything Aiesha might disclose. Despite the ambiguities of the play, the four actresses deliver stunning performances.
Yet, because Shamieh’s poetic text suffers from a surplus of tautologies and allusions, all that intuiting becomes wearying. You tend to focus more on Gabriel Berry’s exceptional period-appropriate garb or the quasi-magical way in which the actresses use vocal intonation as a way to delineate their characters. The best moments are those in which the women function as a de facto Greek chorus, punctuating their laments, wants and wishes with post-modern irony and dead seriousness.
Through Aug. 19, NYTW, 79 E. 4th St. (betw. Bowery & 2nd Ave.), 212-239-6200; $20-$50.
