Fairview NYC Reviews and Tickets

"A singular, shape-shifting drama that transports audiences to places it never expects to go...Although the designers have magnified somewhat the sights and sounds of the production to accommodate a larger theater, it does not appear that the playwright has significantly altered the text. Nor have the actors modified their sterling performances...'Fairview' remains a striking, even startling, consideration of white perceptions regarding racial identity."
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"Twists and turns contain so many surprises, so many unexpected and occasionally jaw-dropping moments, that to describe them would be to ruin half the fun...'Fairview' is extraordinary. It is funny, it is insightful, and it is shocking. It makes you uncomfortable, in all the best ways. It leaves you thinking about it for days afterward, and then it leaves you rethinking what you’ve thought...As Trumpism has come into full flower, 'Fairview' is an eloquent, defiant response."
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"Smart, unexpected, richly layered, difficult, and even confrontational...‘Fairview’ moves from an unremarkable, sitcom-worthy premise to an urgent, incisive examination of how we think about race...Drury offers a window into the frustrations of living and creating as a Black person within our not-so-post-racial world. Thanks to her acute observations, this sharp cast, and Benson's pulsing production, 'Fairview'...is challenging, but always worth the attention."
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"Utterly fascinating and forceful play. Like a good food fight, it wildly throws out implied conventions and disturbing vantage points...It transitions dramatically into a heady examination of race, strongly held expectations, and white privilege. Layered on top is an upsettingly accurate internal dialogue...Directed with resolution and unabashed confidence...the piece pounds us forward dramatically, challenging us to overcome.”
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"The stunning production of 'Fairview,' Drury’s challenging play, is now being remounted with the same extraordinary cast and creative team...The new run offers theatergoers a second chance to see...But, for better or for worse, this second run also comes with a new context...Drury is making a larger point, delivered meta-theatrically, that black people always feel on stage, always being observed, judged, summed up. This message helps make 'Fairview' tricky to review."
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“The play is shattering in a literal sense...A knockout play about race...I’ve never felt more alone while surrounded by people on every side...The play’s scorching final act reversed my isolation to such an extreme that I felt more exposed than if I had succumbed to a primal scream. I later understood why...This isn’t just about a handful of made-up characters on stage, entertaining an audience one minute and forgotten the next."
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“Let me give you fair warning on 'Fairview,' Jackie Sibblies Drury’s dazzling and ruthless new play: If you see it — and you must — you will not be comfortable...You will also wind up questioning your basic right to sit there, especially if, you are a white person...Directed with disarming smoothness...Structured as a series of perspective-altering surprises, and they keep coming at you...A glorious, scary reminder of the unmatched power of live theater to rattle, roil and shake us wide awake.”
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"There are slight longueurs in Sarah Benson’s Soho Rep production—the provoking of mild impatience may be intentional—but its bolder strokes are unforgettable. ‘Fairview’ argues for the possibility of people of color representing themselves, onstage and off, without an overlay of white perception, judgment and narrative. It gently body-checks privilege.”
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“’Fairview’ travels towards the unresolvable, morphing from neatly structured, stereotypical familiarity into rampant chaos and then into fractured, inquisitive aftermath. It begins by giving us something we think we’ve seen before, then estranges us from it and from ourselves as viewers of it, then cracks the whole thing open entirely and forces everyone in the room, actors and audience, to reckon with the broken pieces...Drury is interested in examining race by examining performance.”
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“Hilarious, provocative, and disorienting...Not since 'An Octoroon' has a play so thoroughly traversed the boundaries of race in performance, screwing with our perceptions while forcing us to recognize our blind spots....Benson’s production stealthily slips across the border between realism and absurdism while slowly turning up the heat on us unsuspecting frogs in the audience. This wouldn't be possible without a cast that delivers ballsy, committed performances."
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“A play that began as a stylistic spoof descends into mass chaos, leading to a very funny sequence in which one wild accusation after another is hurled...Doesn't maintain the baseline level of engagement needed to prep us to hear what Drury has to say. The piece is at times overwhelmed by its own theatricality...A satire that swings wide, only occasionally earning a hit. Even when you're trying to demolish a theatrical genre and racism in America, less can be more.”
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"'Fairview' cunningly pulls its audience down a rabbit hole involving race, identity, presumptions and certainly everybody’s original expectations...An attempt to bring the audience into the show proves awkward on several levels...To some extent the playwright succeeds in achieving her ambitious goal, but the meta-theatrics meant to heighten the work fail to realize her intentions...Soho Rep provides a typically tip-top staging of the play, under Sarah Benson’s astute direction."
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"Jackie Sibblies Drury is a unique new voice in the American theater. Her use of metatheater is all her own. 'Fairview' has a great deal to say about race in America and the angle you see things from and she is able to cleverly shift it from scene to scene. However, this new play is a bit too long for its content, with scenes overstaying their welcome. Nevertheless, Drury is a playwright well worth watching."
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"We laugh at the well-timed jokes, dance numbers, and antics so agilely lifted from TV comedy and delivered by the faultless cast...Yet the idea also forms that the genre and the story are vehicles for some more important business. That proves true in the play’s second act where the playwright lands a sucker punch....Benson manages. with physical humor and a deep respect for the playwright’s use of asides and interior monologues to lasso all of these swirling ideas and conflicting energies."
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"Although I'm far from being as enthusiastic as many of my colleagues about Jackie Sibblies Drury's…challenging, theatrically innovative new play about racism…no one can deny that Sarah Benson…has applied her superlative directorial skill and imagination to it…Provocative material, rife with metatheatrical riffs…Nonetheless, it ends with an irritating bit of audience participation that defeats its own purpose and weakens even the best of what's come before."
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"Drury makes Russian-doll dramas; immersive, nesting, metatheatrical plots that usually contain racism as their innermost figure...Drury is drawing her scalpel blade through a tricky bit of flesh, dissecting the core illusion of white audienceship—that it is an anonymous, passive, default group in no way identifiable by its whiteness—with loving, almost tender care. The show is political, in that Drury wants to make the conversation about race in the theater more frank."
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"Some of the plot developments and the ensuing mayhem, while fun to watch, seem partially unearned. The play takes a final abrupt turn with one of the characters making a request of the white audience members...It seemed a flat, disappointing ending for a provocative play. The cast is very good...Benson maintains a firm grip. To some extent, I feel the playwright lost control of her material. Nevertheless, I will be eager to see her next work."
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"Most of the people onstage are black, and most of the people in Soho Rep’s downtown audience are white. This problem, and the racist society for which 'Fairview’s' stage world acts as a microcosm, is the subject of Sibblies Drury’s hugely intelligent play...Insightful, mournful, and harboring maybe a glimmer of hope, 'Fairview' begins as a family comedy...Soon, the Frasiers’ living room is the site of a meticulously crafted, metatheatrical experiment in racial discourse."
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