A review of Crow's Theatre's production of Wights, exploring its strengths and weaknesses. While praising the play's engaging first act and strong performances, the review criticizes the abrupt shift towards supernatural horror in Act 2, which ultimately undermines the play's potential.
Not the play itself, although it certainly aims to shock and unsettle us. No, what left me truly alarmed is that Crow’s, which has had such a string of hits in recent years, could kick off 2025 with this unfortunate misfire. Wights was written by Liz Appel , a novice playwright originally from Toronto, now based in New York, and we’re told this is her first professional production.
Appel does, however, have an impressive academic résumé, including graduate degrees from Yale University and the University of Cambridge, and that’s amply evident here, as I was even ready to hail her play as an equally impressive debut after witnessing its overstuffed but fascinating first act, which manages to address race, privilege, the immigrant experience, the legal system, even land acknowledgments, while at the same time dealing with the tensions of two interracial couples.In Wights, Leslie plays Anita, a professor at Yale who recruits fellow scholar and Chinese immigrant Bing, played by Richard Lee, to help her prepare for a job interview.But then comes Act 2, when everything starts to fall apart – in some cases, literally – like a walking corpse.The lead academic is Anita (Rachel Leslie), a Black professor at Yale who is a candidate to head up the university’s Centre for Reparative Thought and Justice. To prep for her job interview, she’s recruited a fellow scholar, Chinese immigrant Bing (Richard Lee), and his white Canadian-American wife, Celine (Sochi Fried), to grill her. The couple have come over for drinks and dinner at Anita’s childhood home, where she was raised by a pair of professor parents who distinguished themselves at Yale. Enter the outsider, Anita’s half-Jewish husband, Danny (Ari Cohen), whose eyes glaze over at their talk of intersectionality and critical race theory, but who is fighting the good fight down at the courthouse. A criminal defence lawyer, he has just successfully overturned the wrongful conviction of a racialized client. It’s Halloween 2024, and, more ominously, less than a week before the U.S. election – although everyone is still reassuring themselves that Kamala Harris will defeat Donald Trump. Besides, fierce Anita is not only prepared to slay them at the interview tomorrow, that will also be the triumphant day she gains ownership of her beloved house, which she lost when her late father willed it to his second wife. What could go wrong? As it turns out, Danny is about to drop a bombshell that threatens to put Anita’s critiques of privilege to the test, while at the same time revealing a deception that could destroy their marriage.Sochi Fried, left, stars as Bing's Canadian-American wife, Celine. She fits the mild-mannered Canadian stereotype, but is hiding a secret from her spouse.It’s a great cliffhanger to end Act 1. But Appel isn’t content to stick with compelling human drama; she has to drag in the supernatural. In an academic way, that is. As things get weird and characters begin to decompose, Anita spouts a theory about a new kind of being that turns on the contradictory definitions of the archaic word “wight.” It can mean both a living creature, as it often does in classic English poetry, but also something that is undead (think of the army of reanimated cadavers in). She even goes so far as to analyze Shakespeare’s use of the word in the 106th Sonnet – one of those moments when you feel you’re not in a theatre, but a lecture hall. Danny can be just as pedantic and he counters with a deconstruction of the racial term “white,” which would be quite interesting if it weren’t delivered as a feverish, defensive rant. But by then, the play has lost its moorings and its credibility. It ends abruptly with a ludicrous, seemingly COVID-19-inspired twist that undercuts any investment we may have had in the characters or their plight.Wights feels as if its horror element was grafted on, almost as an afterthought. This being a Crow’s show, however, it’s executed with polish. Director Chris Abraham once again uses an in-the-round, semi-immersive staging, with a warmly domestic set from Joshua Quinlan that centres on a kitchen island, but icy jolts of sinister lighting (Imogen Wilson) and sound (Thomas Ryder Payne) to keep us on edge. The most striking feature, however, is a gleaming tiled floor that serves as a screen for Nathan Bruce’s video design, where increasing spatters of blood and a slowly emerging digital clock prove creepier than anything else in the play. For the lead role of Anita, Abraham has imported New York actor Leslie, whose credits include the Broadway production of. Her tough, superarticulate Anita is thoroughly convincing as a woke warrior, a betrayed wife, a conflicted mother and as a daughter still grieving her own mother’s untimely death
Liz Appel Crow's Theatre Wights Theatre Review Supernatural Horror Academic Drama Race Privilege
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