Review: YOGA PLAY at Keegan Theatre

For Keegan Theatre's regional première of Yoga Play by Dipika Guha, Set Designer Matthew J. Keenan provides a sleek, beige unit set onto which Jeremy Bennett's projections shine, pop, narrate, move, and comment. (Be sure to read the changing smoothie descriptions in the Jojomon canteen.) Cindy Landrum Jacobs dresses the set with useful objects which multi-task effortlessly, and Alberto Segarra's lights unify everyone's work. Sound Designer Dan Deiter lets the audience down once in Act I when a phone conversation with a character's mother is garbled and plot points are thus muffled. Otherwise, a very complicated sound plot enhances the production. Shadia Hafiz' costume choices suit southern California corporate offices and yoga studios everywhere.

Anchored by outstanding performances by Keegan regulars and Helen Hayes Award winners Katie McManus and Michael Innocenti, Yoga Play at its core is a sweet allegory which questions the American tendency to over-value material satisfaction which satisfaction is then preyed upon by the American corporate tendency to commodify the tendencies of Americans. (and inhale) McManus plays Joan, a company builder charged with managing the existential crisis of Jojomon--a business that makes and sells yoga gear the manufacture of which has apparently been sub-contracted to child workers. Joan show-runs the two California-style worker bees, Raj and Fred, her offstage assistant whose phone calls always interrupt something, and Romola, the manager of a yoga studio, who is her polar opposite. Joan grapples with them, stress, Jojomon's linguistic obsessions (Customers are not customers; they are "family." Yeah, right.), and The Guru Who Comes From India. McManus' performance will remind audience members of a certain age of those guys with the plates on the Ed Sullivan Show: she has to keep everything in the play spinning. She does, and it's thrilling to watch.

Carianmax Benitez (Romola) and Jacob Yeh (Fred) have only one level: hyper. Guha has given them facets which should really not be "always on." Romola struggles to find authenticity on her yoga mat, and Fred has some belated coming out to do in his native Singapore. Growth does not get revealed when an actor's energy phaser is permanently set on "kill." Vinay Sanapala uses more subtle practice as Raj, the character who is learning his own Indian culture as a second language. He takes over carrying the play's action as the plot un-thickens; thanks to Sanapala's shading and modeling, the audience can accurately read his new-found clarity and intention. Less is also much, much more for Innocenti as The Guru. He brings the only true stillness present in the production, notwithstanding the fact that most of the time neither his fellow characters nor the audience can figure out whether he's The Wizard of Oz or Richard Blaine (of Rick's Café in Casablanca). His character and Innocenti's performance finish Guha's allegorical tapestry and satisfactorily reveal whether he is a good witch or a bad witch.

Absent the availability of Guha's stage directions, it cannot be known whether the playwright or Director, Susan Marie Rhea chose cartoonish farce as the dominant style for this production of Yoga Play. When Joan's efforts to save Jojomon seem doomed, she voices an articulate description of the American glass ceiling system which, obviously, keeps dooming the efforts of women. But Guha, her playwrighting professor at Yale, Paula Vogel, McManus, Rhea, and KBJ (just. . . because) have not succeeded and prevailed because they've run about like the love child of Wile Coyote and the Wicked Witch of the West until yoga practice helped them change. Talent, patience, diligence, skill, wisdom, craftsmanship, stillness never have to compete because they always (you should pardon the expression) trump farce. The words of Yoga Play amply and richly lay this out; hysteria need not apply.

Happy Silver Anniversary Season, Keegan. Yoga Play's a good choice for 2022 because America never quite actually knows who/what it is, and this play is about learning what to know and how to know it.

The two hour play runs through April 23; find tickets for Yoga Play at https://keegantheatre.com/tickets/

(photo by Cameron Whitman

(L to R): Jacob Yeh, Katie McManus, Vinay Sanapala)