Fairview NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (186)
See it if you are open to a provocative play designed to make you uncomfortable and alter your perspective of white people looking at black people.
Don't see it if you are not willing to be amused, feel uneasy, probably annoyed, and then unsettled. But that is why you go to the theater. So go anyway!
See it if you want an interesting take on racial depictions & our inability to escape the common narrative, in an unforgettable theatrical experience
Don't see it if you're easily offended, mind being uncomfortable at the theater, prefer a single point of view, or like more traditional linear plays.
See it if you can get a ticket.
Don't see it if you want to have an objectively "enjoyable" time. Read more
See it if you want an experience that will make you think. You will be uncomfortable. You will have an opinion, and that's okay.
Don't see it if you're not comfortable with shows that make you feel uncomfortable or make you ask questions. This is not a fluffy "escape" play. Read more
See it if u want to see one of the most original, astute, penetrating, shrewd, enlightening and, yes, discomforting plays on race u may ever witness.
Don't see it if you refuse to get out of your comfort zone and face the realities of racism, cultural appropriation & inherent flaws in the human condition. Read more
See it if you want to see an important, bold and essential piece of contemporary American theatre that is asking the most necessary questions.
Don't see it if you want something light-hearted.
See it if you want to see a remarkable, original, innovative play that has an incisive take on race and power and knocks you out theatrically.
Don't see it if you've buried your head in the sand and want to keep pretending that our culture doesn't have a problem with racism.
See it if you want an experience you will not soon forget. I hesitate to say more for fear of spoiling the experience.
Don't see it if you have a closed mind.
Critic Reviews (18)
“’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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