Good News: Pre-Existing Condition Has Returned

“You can attend, stay quiet, and just listen,” a facilitator instructs a group for women who have experienced domestic violence at the beginning of Marin Ireland’s Pre-Existing Condition. “Being in the room and listening is just as important as talking.” Played by a warm yet firm Dael Orlandersmith, she’s reciting the rules to newcomer—a role referred to as “A,” played by a rotating cast of actresses; in my case, Lupita Nyong’o—and instructing the audience. Cate McCrea’s set design has done over the Greenwich House Theater, where Ireland’s play has re-emerged two years after its premiere, into a worn replica of the anonymous “sad small room” where this group assembles. There’s a water cooler, marked as broken, off to the side of the stage, a back wall smeared over with white paint in the style of a careless landlord, and, as A describes it, “depressing indoor-outdoor stained carpet and fluorescent lighting.” Those of us among the audience are, by implication, among the meeting’s attendees, and our engagement with Ireland’s play, under Maria Dizzia’s direction, has a certain active power. “If any discomfort is palpable in the audience,” Ireland writes in her playwright’s note, “remember that’s how it feels in the group.”

Ireland’s slim but searching play presents an issue of deep discomfort and homes in on the subject of that larger communal response. How do we, as a group, process a terrible act committed against an individual? How is it smoothed over? How is it healed? Does one impulse contradict the other? A was in a relationship with a man who blackened her eye during an argument, an act for which she—owing to the facts that it occurred out of state and there were no hospital bills, and other extenuating circumstances—doesn’t have much legal recourse, though she longs for a way to make sense of that trauma. “There’s supposed to be a system in place, right?” she says in one burst of frustration toward a former friend, “I want to do the right thing, and I can’t fucking find it.” The events recreate Ireland’s own experience with the actor Scott Shepherd in 2012, an act that was messily adjudicated before MeToo, and which, as of Pre-Existing Condition, is still a raw thing. (The play’s title refers to the fact that, before 2017, federal law allowed insurers to deny coverage by listing domestic violence as a pre-existing condition.) Throughout the play, A speaks with lawyers, family members, mediators, friends of various sympathies toward her and her ex-partner, all played by Orlandersmith, Sarah Steele, and Greg Keller, all returning to the production for a second time, and each covering a spectrum of different roles. (Their character tracks are referred to as “B,” “C,” and “D.”) You’re struck by both the way in which the people around “A” keep prodding her to package and reduce her actions to a specific description or aim—“Do you want revenge or something?” one friend asks blithely—and the ways in which she already has done the reduction herself. She’s internalized a sense of self-blame—for being “trash,” A tells a therapist, because “it’s almost a peaceful thought, which I guess is what makes it feel like it must be true?”

That line stuck with me, especially as delivered by Nyong’o, an actress of great poise who played A like someone trying to fold the laundry of her life into rectangles in front of you. You already know Nyong’o’s face—lately, you may have seen her on IMAX in the double role of Helen of Troy, also depicted as abused, and a vengeful Clytemnestra in The Odyssey—and there’s a sense of hyperreality that comes with encountering any movie star at human scale onstage, though an advantage of Nyong’o’s ability as a performer lies in her talent for projected withdrawal. Doubt and conflict flows through not just her searching eyes but also, in this case, a shrinking, defensive posture. She looks so literally small across from Keller, who does excellent work as several men who don’t seem to clock the mass of their own bodies and wobble along the knife’s edge of charming and scary, that every subterranean act of male assertiveness registers as a quake. The dramatic action in Ireland’s script is intentionally spare and straightforward—we see A go from one conversation to another; often the characters are simply sitting together, or on the phone with each other—but her dialogue pulses with those moments of discomfort, while Dizzia blocks the actors in stark spacial relationships (often, C will appear on the phone looming behind A) that keep your eye on the way these characters wield their bodies. Not just the men in A’s life, either: Steele is one of New York’s performers of frankness—as a hero or a villain, she’ll always give it to you straight—and in this run she’s performing while pregnant. As she alternates among women in A’s life who judge or console her, you notice how the act of touching her belly plays differently: solace, sympathy, or harsh, tradwifely judgment.

Nyong’o is playing A until September 26, after which the role will pass among a succession of other actresses: Phillipa Soo, Susannah Flood, Hari Nef, Edie Falco, and Whitney White. (The previous run of Pre-Existing Condition did the same, with Tatiana Maslany, Julia Chan, Deirdre O’Connell, Tavi Gevinson, and Dizzia herself in the lead.) Though that format makes it difficult to offer a judgment of how the production will play in future weeks, the awareness that A will be portrayed through new actresses in new iterations gives Pre-Existing Condition another point of open-ended resonance. You’re more aware both, in the specific sense, of how the person playing A in front of you adds a context to the role that may be present for only a short time: In Nyong’o’s case, for instance, there was an added lane of communication between herself and Orlandersmith’s therapist as Black women. In the back of your mind, you wonder how that context will shift around another body. How will another audience respond when A is an older woman, a younger woman, of a different race, a trans woman? That dynamic gives your specific performance a sense of belonging within a chain. Characters keep asking A to head straight to resolution. She often asks that of herself. But the play keeps the conversation going—for as long, at least, as there are audiences there to listen.

Pre-Existing Condition is at the Greenwich House Theater through January 8.