Nazareth Hassan’s Theater of Small Violences

I felt like there were a couple of references to recent works, and I could be reading way too far into it, but I did wonder, were those choices—like the mirrored stage Asa brings on behind the company in the second act—inspired by something that you’ve seen in past years that you wanted to bring into conversation here?

I think the second act to me was like, how can I distill everything that’s happened in the first act into this really forward, absurd, post-traumatic, maybe Brechtian gesture, where everything feels like exactly what it means?

Asa is finally being completely transparent about his intentions and desires. And I think that the sort of mirror idea came from that, that sense of like, there’s a distortion of how these characters are seeing themselves now, right? He’s brainwashed them, in a sense.

I also spent a good amount of time working in Germany. And I think those kinds of gestures, like people in a glass box, are pretty—I wouldn’t say ubiquitous, but they’re popular. So I think that was something that I was thinking about as well. Like, if this person is going to Germany, what is the sort of reference to that theater culture that is the most flagrant.

In the preview I was at, there were two probably high school-aged boys in the row behind me. I honestly have no idea how old they are, they could have been in college. But they were whispering during the second act to each other that the staging looked like AI. And I actually loved that reading of it. We all have the capacity to make these infinite numbers of avatars now. As a playwright, how does that strike you, and what do you hope people take from the show?

Well, I think in regards to the AI question, a large part of my thesis for the play is that theater is one of the first gestures of virtual life. Creating the world as one person, as a programmer, sees it. A friend of mine named Lucas wrote an essay that I think is gonna be coming out soon about “Practice” that refers to [the play] as feeling like “The Sims.” And I think the throughline of theater as manipulation, theater as a prosthetic world separate from our own, has a kernel of these ideas about AI and video games or anything that gives us a simulacrum.