What You Are Now NYC Reviews and Tickets

"Chanse makes it clear that Pia is a prickly character, suspicious of outsiders and prone to take offense when none is meant. That can make for a compelling protagonist, especially as we get to understand them better. But the task is nearly impossible when the barriers never come down, even for the audience...Elements of the production draw us back in, especially Brown, whose performance is haunting, hilarious, and surprising until the very end...Director Steve Cosson delivers a competent staging, but is unable to inject any adrenaline into a sleepy script."
Read more

what you are now was funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation as part of an effort to encourage plays that explore scientific issues. But science plays an ancillary role here…Chanse has taken on more than she can comfortably handle. A play about the scientific effort to reprogram memories would be fascinating and, quite possibly, disturbing. As Lauren Yee has already demonstrated with Cambodian Rock Band, the fallout from the Khmer Rouge is a rich subject for investigation. In taking on both, what you are now scants both.
Read more

"Looking at the make-up of the play's characters, you can rightly guess that there is a great deal of complexity being presented in just about 90 minutes. Remarkably, the playwright and director Steve Cosson are able to find the time and space to explore each relationship and interaction, so that (almost) nothing seems forced. The one exception is a plot strand involving one person's status as an undocumented immigrant, something that interferes with the delicate balance in place and which might better be explored in a separate play of its own."
Read more

"4/5 stars...Playwright Chanse craftily works them into an intermissionless 100-minute play in which all five characters caught in the heavy whirl reach redemptive conclusions. To her credit, Chanse presents no easy solutions, which marks her, with 'Out of Time’s' 'Disturbance Specialist,' as a new voice demanding attention. Notable as well is that Cosson tends to the five-member cast with his usual forcefulness."
Read more

As a play about neuroscience, Sam Chanse’s what you are now needs a great deal more data and information. As a play about the plight of Cambodian refugees, what are you now needs to be clearer and less convoluted, although ultimately it is quite powerful and moving. Informative about the startling situation of these refugees, the play needs to be seen and heard, but in this form it defeats its own purposes by being confusing in chronology and not offering the drama behind the science of trauma and memory.
Read more

"It’s most successful when Chanse stops trying to explain the infrastructure behind what her characters think and feel; the more its characters describe scientific concepts and the psychological value of survivor testimony and the physiology of fear, the drier and the less grounded in human relationships and human experience the play becomes. And there is a deep well of human experience, of a family’s story, at the heart here–there’s just not enough of that heart in the play."
Read more

While it’s gratifying that the push by New York theaters to elevate underrepresented voices has expanded enough to include such an infrequently depicted community as Cambodian Americans, the play is hampered by stilted dialogue and uninspiring staging. Too often, what the characters say seems to be for the audience’s benefit instead of a natural-sounding conversation.
Read more