"Directed with restraint by Fagan and imbued with uncommon humanity by an impressive cast, 'The Profane' is by turns warm and wary, combative and conciliatory...Dohrn is examining the cultural unease between the secular and the fundamentalist...An emotionally charged secret...becomes the play’s big reveal—a tangled, wobbly moment that doesn’t land with anywhere near the force it needs...By contrast, the rest of the play feels organic even in its intellectual sparring."
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"The play itself is unengaging, it suffers from lurches of illogic and a haphazard approach to character...'The Profane' doesn't work...Arguments spring up that could have easily been avoided by prior conversations, the hallmark of a play that doesn't believe in its own offstage life...The talented Kip Fagan directs, and his impulse to lean into the text's surface realism exacerbates the weak writing...In a few spots, performances make up for the under-developed characters."
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"Imagine 'Meet the Parents' but with two Muslim immigrant families and you’ll get something a bead on author Zayd Dohrn’s timely and topical but frustratingly incomplete and unevenly acted play...Things turn ugly — and contrived. And unresolved, which isn’t inherently a weakness, but the drama feels like a first draft. Two fine things emerge: Heather Raffo’s well-wrought turn as Emina’s mother, and the author’s evergreen observation that parents really don’t know who their children are."
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"All of Dohrn's characters are drawn with intricate complexity: a web of contradicting ideals, impulses, and behavior — they feel like real people...While Dohrn has convincingly written individuals, he heartbreakingly dramatizes the tragedy of them not listening to one another...Dohrn tantalizes us by revealing narrow passageways through which understanding could flow. He also shows us how easily they can be dammed up in a rush of grandstanding sanctimony."
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“The conflicts that arise when future in-laws meet for the first time have been a traditional source of comedy for both stage and screen. But Zayd Dohrn takes a dramatic twist on the subject...Director Kip Fagan's production is brisk and simple and features a fine cast. While 'The Profane' has a very interesting setup, the text, while entertaining, needs to dig a little deeper to bring out the layers of its subject.”
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"Simultaneously one of the most interesting and frustrating new plays to open in the last several weeks...Dohrn provides plenty of crackling dialogue...The bombshell, when it finally drops, is pretty spectacular...But at this point 'The Profane' is on a fast track to its conclusion...Dohrn has planted a great deal of drama in his play, but he ignites only a portion of it...Fortunately, Kip Fagan's direction keeps thing fast, funny, and tense, aided by a cast alive to the play's many nuances."
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"The problem with both the play and Kip Fagan's stylish but laid-back production of it is that the inherent differences don't lead to anything more heated than a brief tiff...This would matter less if Dohrn didn't set the stage for a serious conflagration of competing ideas...The individual characters could be drawn more fully, too...Fagan has directed it all a bit like a sitcom, which can suck the air out of some of the more loaded moments, but he does keep things moving fluidly."
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"Dohrn engagingly develops his story without making anyone a villain...The playwright cleverly reverses the attitudes and behaviors of the characters in each family...To Zayd Dohrn's credit, he continues to use the world around us to create timely plays that don't rely on easy happy endings to complex beginnings. Kip Fagan, too, deserves credit for supervising a beautifully staged production and eliciting believable performances from the 7-member cast."
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