SUPPLEMENTS: Nazareth Hassan
BOWL EP is a lesson in love...and other drugs.
Playwright feels like too small a word for Nazareth Hassan. My first encounter with their work was BOWL EP, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. Unconstrained by convention, Hassan’s prismatic practice fuses music, performance, image making and text to remember and imagine; to interrogate and excavate. Recently named a New York Times Critic’s Pick and enjoying a second extension at The Vineyard Theater, BOWL EP dares to rupture the theatrical experience–for both the cast and audiences alike—conjuring a play not just to be watched, but felt.
I caught up with Naz in the East Village, straight out of understudy rehearsal for BOWL EP. Navigating the jagged edges of intimacy, BOWL EP is a queer love story that takes place between two amateur rappers, Kelly K Klarkson (Essence Lotus) and Quentavius da Quitter (Oghenero Gbaje). Set in a skate park, in the middle of a wasteland, at the edge of the galaxy, the story is a (acid) trip viciously torn open by inner demons, in the form of Lemon Pepper Wings expertly embodied by Felicia Curry. Psychedelic and absurd, BOWL EP is also soberingly devastating. You feel it all.
Xiomara: How are you feeling? What do you feel?
Nazareth: I feel…It's so complicated. I mean, I feel good. Like, I feel good, I feel accomplished.
Xiomara: Yes, as you should.
Nazareth: Thank you. I feel invigorated. Theater is a social prompt and it starts ripples. It's always both humbling and so deeply exciting to see what the ripple is. It also can be daunting. It’s like, What have I done? What am I doing? I'm influencing all these people, so there's the responsibility of that, but also still being a scientist about it in a sense. I feel...I feel good, I feel tired.
Xiomara: On the ripples, what has the reception been like? Do you see it? Does it feel apparent to you?
Nazareth: I definitely see the reception. I try to not shy away from it because I feel like it's my responsibility to own what I've done; to own what I've created and to take stock. I think the reception has been uh—it's always surprising. I've been most shocked by how much people are affected by it. People are sending me these messages and coming up to me and saying things like I haven't processed this before. I’m watching people internalize the work and then experience it for themselves in their own body and take it away. It’s a mindfuck witnessing people coming to understand themselves in different ways. You never think that your play—like, your play—is able to do that for people. So there's that. And then there are people who are like very much not with it, who are like, I don't want that. Thank you. To which I’m like, tea! but you don't have to, right? What's most exciting is that no one's bored!
Xiomara: At least they feel something!
Nazareth: If you don't like it, at least you're not bored. I live! The people who the play is about and the play is for: people like me—like us, they're taking it and coming to the theater and they feel invited into the theater, which I feel is the biggest accomplishment. And then, watching people who you wouldn't expect to connect with it, connect with it. Sometimes, I'll have older white audience members be so engaged. I think that is exciting as well—it's unexpected.
Xiomara: When you're writing, are you envisioning how the audience might receive the work?
Nazareth: I don't think I imagine them as I'm writing. Playwriting is about prompting the audience and conditioning the audience as opposed to expecting a reaction. So in that sense when I'm writing, I'm thinking about the conditions I want to create. For BOWL EP, I was thinking a lot about shame, and what conditions need to be created in order for people to be able to process that together; shame being this highly social experience, social emotion. Writing this love story where these things that may not normally be easy to accept or do, become easy to do—there's a deep acceptance. That acceptance and silliness and sincerity being a condition for the heartbreak to exist: the heartbreak of not being able to acknowledge yourself. So, yeah, I don't think I see [the audience] as much as I think about what I want them to experience, to feel.
Xiomara: Totally. I really liked how watching BOWL EP felt so intimate, so visceral. We, the audience, are so close and then sometimes the light gets turned up on us and you're like, Oh shit, I'm exposed! I’m in this! What was the process of creating that environment?
Nazareth: When I wrote it, I knew that I imagined it in the round and being watched from above. The energy of the room is collected in this one space, so it's tense. A lot of what we were talking about with the set designers (Adam Rigg and Anton Volovsek) was how to set us in a space but also acknowledge that we're in a theater; to give us a sense of a constructed reality with the untreated wood and the fluorescence. We’re acknowledging that we're in this room and that the room itself—the performative experience—is the cocoon. Lemon Pepper Wings being in charge of the performance, or being of the performance, sort of confirms that. The idea that we were playing with was basically creating a logic where as they're doing more drugs the world is becoming more distorted. They're also becoming less and less exposed until the end. Things are becoming obscured, more focused, more pointed and that was something that was consistent through all of the design development.
Xiomara: Even in the typography in the projections.
Nazareth: Exactly…the sound too. As opposed to thinking about a literal sense of time, we were thinking about what this relationship would feel like in a memory. We wanted to remember what it's like to do molly and what happens to you on molly, the texture; it shapes how the world around you feels as opposed to trying to represent this as if we're just watching it.
Xiomara: I love this notion of obscuring and exposing. Lemon Pepper Wings has this moment towards the end of the play where he/she/they literally tears everything open. How did you arrive at these choices? Were they choices?
Nazareth: I think that was something that kind of happened naturally. When I first started writing it, it was actually very soapy, but there was still a certain edginess or roughness to it. I did a bunch of drafts to find the texture of their relationship because I was interested in the ways in which a relationship confirms the parts of you that are the most crunchy. Thinking about these people, skateboarders tend to be more risk taking. I thought a lot about edgelords1 and meme culture. I was thinking about people like Tyler, The Creator, how he—or Odd Future— might use violence or extremity, particularly extreme comedy, to mask trauma. When I found that texture, I was like, ah, yeah! with these characters that is the dramatic function of language in their relationship; to push things to an extreme as a means of—subconsciously or not—being able to talk about their own trauma. So, yeah, that sense of occlusion in what is said and what isn’t, felt like an essential texture.
These are two people who found each other and connect because they use language in that way. Or they use extremity or violence in that way. And I think that is exacerbated when Lemon Pepper Wings comes out and all these things that have been unsaid are now visible. You know, because of the drugs, naturally. I feel like when I've done my little acid, she showed me myself. It was very: this is you, whether you want it or not.
Xiomara: You mentioned Tyler and Odd Future, are there any other references or maybe even works of your own that fed into writing BOWL?
Nazareth: So, I really love Gregg Araki, the filmmaker. I think his aesthetics are really nice, but I also like his crassness; using crassnesses as a way to describe pain. I was just listening to a lot of music. It’s very 2010s of me, but artists like BbyMutha, Father and rappers who are able to really effortlessly move through tone. I think Tyler does that really well as well; flipping tone and creating all these different prismatic versions of himself.
Xiomara: While we’re on music, you have a music background. Why the EP as the play’s framing?
Nazareth: Yeah, I think it's really more of a mix tape, it's a bunch of tracks. The EP is short form and EPs always feel incomplete to me, and there’s something about [Quentavious and Kelly’s] relationship that feels like it stopped before it was able to continue. An EP is what their relationship was centered around and it felt appropriate that it was what frames them as well.
Xiomara: What was it like collaborating with Free Fool on the music?
Nazareth: We've known each other for a long time, since we were young. Judah is incredibly talented. He has extreme aptitude—it's just incredible. I started producing in 2020, so we had time...we had time! Around this time, I was also making these live sound scores, performance scores, and learning Ableton and Logic (music production softwares). I made this song called moonface and he was on it. That was the first thing we ever worked on. For the play, I didn't really need to—and still don't need to—explain a lot of things to him even though he's not a theater person. I gave him the play, he read it and then he was like, oh yeah, this character is like this, this characters like this, I'm gonna write a rap about this particular aspect of the relationship. Of course, there was some collaboration involved, but I was able to just throw beats of any kind at him and he was able to just catch it and metabolize it and that is the version that we performed, the first cut. It was just very simple. I'm very grateful.
Xiomara: You mentioned that Judah is not a “theater person”. You also said in a previous interview that “you’re a playwright but you don't feel like you make plays.” I wanna unpack that. What do you mean by that?
Nazareth: I think that the (capital T) “Theater Complex” is very attached to its labels and attached to its traditions and its formulas. I'm very familiar with those formulas, I have a lot of training. But I'm not attached to those formulas. They only work for me as much as I need them to work for me. For me, playwriting is, on a conceptual level, about creating a text that forms social impact or an experience, and not necessarily in a social justice way, but a text that does something. I had a teacher that always said a play is a call to action, it is meant to move. But I think the idea of a play is very stifled. Even in some of the reception of this play, there's a resistance to anything that is not representational or completely dramatic, completely psychological. When I think about the experience of a performance I think it's something that's much more important than a story.
Xiomara: Absolutely! To me, that's the difference between film and theater. You're physically in space together and there are stakes to you sitting next to people, stakes to you interrupting, reacting. It’s such a sensational experience.
Nazareth: It's feeling before you think. Creating text and performances that pull you out of your head. I think my favorite performances are pieces of work that don't allow me to think and to judge; that force me to feel it first. I try to find the line of what is the least amount of thinking necessary to feel fully. I think Judah not being a theater person actually helps. He's a musician, so he has a natural sense of how words influence the body, the sound of them and the feeling of them before the cognition of it. Yeah, I don't know, feeling forward!
Xiomara: You wrote and directed this play, writing is very concerned with the text and then directing is looking at the experience of it. Do those processes happen simultaneously for you? Do you feel like you’re constantly switching hats?
Nazareth: I started writing plays to direct, so I was a director first. That's what I went to study. I started feeling like writing plays was like writing music to choreograph to. A lot of times with a play like BOWL EP, it's very intentionally choreographed for rhythm and for images and for the event. Very rarely do I write something that I'm not seeing. [Writing and directing] sort of happen in tandem. I was definitely seeing the titles, and imagining the concert, and imagining Lemon Pepper Wings imagistically while I was writing. It was choreographically led in that sense.
Xiomara: And what led you to bring BOWL EP to life as a story? You mentioned you wrote it six years ago, why now to bring it to the stage?
Nazareth: God, yeah, so long ago. I wrote it when I was 23. I was a baby. I remember not knowing how to love. I just felt like I didn't have a lot of examples of what it meant to love someone. I didn't feel like I was particularly attractive or worthy of love. And at this time, I’d just graduated college, and was like, I'm going to learn how to love. I was very specifically like I'm gonna learn what it means to connect and be in intimacy. I felt like it was something so foreign to me. When I wrote BOWL EP, it was an explosion of desire and being desired that I was experiencing in my life and everything that comes with that: the realization of trauma, the realization of repression. BOWL EP was a way for me to process. A lot of times when I'm writing, I write things that I don't consciously know yet.
Xiomara: And what is that like revisiting those things, at 29, that you didn’t know you were expressing?
Nazareth: Oh no, it was crazy! I wrote this pre-pandemic. I think a lot of people have the experience of going into lockdown and going to therapy, or like having to deal with your shit.
Xiomara: Oh yeah, we’ve been there!
Nazareth: Down! Ate us all up, okay! Real bad. I was also included in that. I had a lot of coming to. Coming to repressed memories, coming to trauma, coming to myself in a new way. And I am now this person that's armed with all this new self knowledge. I feel very blessed, and I feel very powerful. I also feel very vulnerable because when you learn yourself, you learn yourself. So you're like, damn, okay, that's me too. It's all me. Okay, period. Do you know what the sublime theory is?
Xiomara: Tell me more…
Nazareth: It's really in reference to humans seeing something of scale that is much larger than them and makes them feel like they are really small. It expands their understanding of the world; like a human seeing a huge mountain. I like to think about that and apply it to the experience of your mind expanding to encompass a new level of consciousness, a new level of awareness. The play is about that experience of doing a drug or meeting a person, that expands your mind in a way that you were not ready for. In Quentavious’ case, a rejection of that [revelation]. After having experienced so many of those moments in the six years in between [writing and eventually staging the play], I did not know that that was what I was writing. But I know it now. I'm getting chills thinking about it. It's one of the things I love theater for (that can be equally as frustrating)–the way time allows you to return to essential parts of your experience and to put yourself back inside of those moments as this older version of yourself, a caretaker to your younger self. It's very beautiful. It wasn't always nice. I mean, sometimes it was like damn, I'm a crazy person, like, I am crazy! I can’t believe I wrote this.
Xiomara: Aren’t we all?! We’re all crazy, it's just that some of us vocalize it.
Nazareth: Exactly! ‘Cause I be running my mouth. I'm an air sign, like I said! But yeah, that's been such a special experience.
Xiomara: You have a new play, Practice, coming up in October at Playwrights Horizons. What are you excited about?
Nazareth: First and foremost, being able to work with my amazing director Keenan Oliphant. I rarely feel understood by directors, so I usually don't like to work with other directors.
Xiomara: Interesting, how do you feel handing over that role?
Nazareth: I feel really good because he's not only a great collaborator, he's a great friend to me, so I feel very comfortable with him. Practice is very prismatic and intense in a different way. I wrote it two years ago, so it's much newer. It's hyperrealism, so the form is different. It's about power: examining why I desire the kind of power that comes with being a theater maker; the kind of power that you have over other people's bodies and minds, and then zooming out and thinking about looking at how power exists inside of the theater in general. And that being attached to the performance of politics in a sense. How performance and politics are embroiled. Yeah, light topics!
BOWL EP is running until June 22 at The Vineyard Theater, tickets available here. Nazareth’s next play, Practice will run from October to December 2025 at Playwrights’ Horizons, more information here.
Follow Nazareth on IG: @naznaznazznaznaznazz
Listen to the BOWL EP Director’s Playlist on Spotify.
Someone, usually online, who intentionally expresses dark, shocking, or offensive opinions to gain attention or impress others)
“the way time allows you to return to essential parts of your experience and to put yourself back inside of those moments as this older version of yourself, a caretaker to your younger self.” It must be something in the air when these young people are able to convey meaning in such profound ways and shake me to core. Sages in a former life - this is so beautiful!😍