Smart actors, inventive set design, and 12 different playwrights couldn’t save this fragmented production at HERE Arts Center from collapsing under the weight of its own abstract ideas.
CREDIT: Jose Miranda
Well... that happened, I guess.
While watching The Kick Inside at HERE Arts Center, I found myself remembering that Friends episode where everyone watches Joey in a play that ends with aliens. It makes no sense, no one gets it, and it’s just one of those weird things you HAVE to go to because your friend is in it.
Box checked, I guess?
But seriously, I felt like a prisoner to nonsense. Like I was trapped in an improv show where the actors kept refusing to “YES, AND” each other. Someone introduces an idea, the next person ignores it, and eventually, you, the audience, are left trying to assign meaning or understanding to the production’s choices.
And the painful thing was, the actors were really good. I believed that they believed in whatever they were doing. There were flashes of great physical and prop humor. During the first set change, the actors never stopped performing; one of them cartwheeled across the stage while the scenery moved around her. For a moment, the set change itself became part of the play. I thought: okay, this is interesting.
But that never happened again.
CREDIT: Jose Miranda
Each scene seemed to live and die entirely in its own moment. Nothing accumulated. Nothing moved forward. Something interesting would happen, and instead of building on it, the play would simply abandon it.
Even the set had that problem. It was cleverly constructed from fabric, foam core, and other visibly simple materials, and at times its placement was genuinely inventive. But it was also noisy and flimsy enough to distract from how cool it looked.
The whole production reminded me of one of those experimental films from the 1960s you only ever see clips of: jumbled, fragmented, operating on an almost hallucinatory, drug-induced logic. I usually enjoy that kind of work—something surreal, something absurd. I don’t need a conventional plot, a neat ending, or even an explanation. But I can’t really call The Kick Inside either of those things, because surrealism and absurdism still have to do something beyond confusing me.
After the show, I read that we were following Alenka through a world where communication is breaking down and she is becoming increasingly alienated from the people around her. The script was assembled from scenes by 12 playwrights, which certainly explained some of the disconnection from scene to scene. But that hindsight did not make the disconnection more satisfying, or, frankly, more acceptable.
I felt nothing for Alenka, and at times it seemed like the play didn’t either. Roughly three scenes before the end, she puts on a blonde wig. Other characters mention that she looks familiar, and then she essentially disappears, completely absent from the ending, which shifts its attention elsewhere entirely.
Credit: Jose Miranda
After a while, I started resenting how much interpretive work I was being asked to do on the production’s behalf. I kept feeling like I was being forced to attribute meaning to things that may not have been meaningful—or, at least, had not been made meaningful onstage. That became the pattern: introduce something, abandon it, introduce something else.
The play never developed.
Now, maybe I’m just being a bit bitchy, but I find theater that seems intent on pushing its audience away distasteful. Not because art needs to be pleasant or accessible. It doesn’t. But there is a point where provocation stops feeling like a conversation with an audience and starts feeling like an insistence on the artist’s own brilliance: If you don’t get it, audience, then you’re the idiot.
And I have the same problem with a certain kind of conceptual art—the idea that “the art is art because it is an idea.”
You guys, an idea is not art... yet. It’s an idea.
An idea is nothing until you make something of it. If you aren’t going to bring the same passion, attention, and detail to its execution that made the idea exciting in the first place, then what was the point of the idea? A fascinating concept does not automatically produce fascinating art, and intention does not protect execution from criticism.
I do not need theater to make me happy or even make sense. I do not need a conventional plot or a neat ending. But if you are asking for my time, attention, and money, give me SOMETHING. Make me laugh. Make me uncomfortable. Make me angry. Make me think about it later.
There are moments when the whole thing seems on the verge of becoming something. But mostly, after about half an hour, I just wanted to leave.
There is a difference between asking an audience to participate in making meaning and making the audience responsible for inventing the meaning altogether. You want to make a show about communication? Then do that. Because a play about communication in which scene after scene seems unwilling to communicate with the scene before it creates an interesting irony—but irony alone is not enough to sustain an evening or an argument.
Perhaps there was supposed to be no actual through-line in the text or story. Fine. But if that absence was intentional, intention does not suddenly make it successful. It just means the thing frustrating me was a choice.
Eventually, the nonsense stopped feeling provocative.
It was just boring.