Lives During Wartime: I’m Not Even Half and Delirium

There’s a tipsy sense of inversion in the title of Layla Khoshnoudi’s I’m Not Even Half that slowly seeps throughout the play, like the gradual spreading of dye in water. The phrasing suggests an empty-glass perspective, but Khoshnoudi carefully sets up the moment in which her character, known only as “S,” reminds us where she’s really looking from. “Where did this weakness come from? I should be strong like them,” she says, berating herself for what she feels as cowardice as she watches women protesting in the streets of Iran through the portal of her phone. “I’m Iranian. Full! Both sides. I’m not even half.”

S is a Brooklynite in 2022, hooked to her phone as the uprising in response to the murder of Mahsa Amini unfolds thousands of miles away and a few inches from her face. Earlier in the play, in her distraction, she stepped off the curb near Herbert Von King Park and a reversing car knocked her flat. As inciting incidents go, it’s a literal bash on the head, and Khoshnoudi uses it both to throw S into a tailspin and to wake her up. A smart, sad, self-laceratingly funny solo show in the tradition of Fleabag, I’m Not Even Half also brings to mind a more PG-rated lost heroine: After her bonk, S becomes an Alice down the rabbit hole of her own addictions and shames. She badly needs a perspective shift, a tumble head over heels, to show her just how clouded her own vision has been.

It’s also Emmie Finckel’s set — spare and ominously lit by Cheyenne Sykes, with its own portal opening cut out of the shadowed scrim back wall — that suggests falling down some murky spiraling tunnel. As she tells us her story, S navigates a variety of workaday New York settings — sidewalks and smoke shops, an ambulance, an Uber, a hospital, an apartment. The most exotic might be the CAT-scan machine where she sings a noodling, possibly concussed ode to her cooler-than-thou friend, Julianne, who surprises her by actually showing up after S texts her a bloodied duck-lips selfie. But Sykes, Finckel, and director Machel Ross intentionally and effectively blur the edges of all these environments. S mostly teeters from one dim pool of light to the next, as smears of luminous color appear and evanesce behind the set’s permeable backdrop, stoplights in the rain. It feels eerily empty, digital, ephemeral — as if S landed not on the asphalt of Marcy Avenue but inside the very phone that caused her injury. It’s a subtly impressive feat that Khoshnoudi gets us to laugh as much as she does from within such a container. This isn’t a space for comedy. It is, objectively, a bit nightmarish. 

But S is determined to equivocate (and vape) away the shadows for as long as she can. Yes, what she’s seeing on social media is horrific, but comparatively, she’s, like, so completely fine, right? “Now we’re all familiar with this torturous phenomenon of being able to watch something terrible happen somewhere that you’re not,” she tells us dryly. “The feeling of being very, very close to something but not under direct threat by it — which, I’m not complaining: I can barely handle Literally Anything. I don’t want to be under direct threat!” The truth is that, as she tries to help “raise awareness with my posting,” she’s at least as fraught, if not more so, over the fact that an artsy guy called Harry isn’t texting her back. They’re on-again, off-again, and S talks about him like an alcoholic who insists she can quit any time. He’s a “crazy beast,” a “full Technicolor experience”; “the world is visibly less bright in his physical absence”; plus “like, he challenges me.”

The flags couldn’t be redder, and Khoshnoudi nimbly sketches out the circuitous emotional paths S takes to avoid seeing them until such evasion suddenly and brutally becomes impossible. The violence men inflict on women — perpetually, ruthlessly, everywhere, with or without the pretext of religion or “morality” — sits at the heart of I’m Not Even Half like a creature lurking at the center of a maze. Eventually, S will have to confront it without the distance of pixels, miles, or irony: The threat has always been more direct than she’s let herself admit.

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The kind of mass upheaval that S is witnessing in her country of ancestry — the kind that makes her own life seem limp and little compared with its atrocities and its heroism — is right outside the boarded-up windows for the couple at the center of Delirium. But here, wherever here is, it’s clear that righteous protest is hardly the driving force behind the screams and the bombs, the sirens and building raids. Freely adapted by the director Igor Golyak from Ionesco’s 1963 play Délire à deux (usually titled in English Frenzy for Two, or More), Delirium takes place in a world of morbid foregone conclusions. The monsters are in power and the purges are taking place. The war is eternal — it may calm down for a while but it always restarts, its sides indiscernible and its cause irrelevant, and every time you look, another neighbor has been taken away.

No wonder its particular brand of dark absurdism — a mad dance in the face of a madder world — felt right to Golyak now. In the past I have found his work visually ingenious but heavy-handed, a popcorn machine of images that add vitality without always mitigating his tendency to make a big, blunt point early and often. That phenomenon is still at play in Delirium, but in Ionesco — and especially in the show’s power pair of actors, the Russian expats and brilliant clowns Andrey Burkovskiy and Chulpan Khamatova — Golyak has found means and material that suit his inclinations. The play is a series of games all hung on the hook of a deadly premise: What do you do with your time when you’re trapped, when the world is ending outside, when you have nothing but each other and time and who knows how much of it?

At the Irondale space in Fort Greene, on a dust-covered set (by Jan Pappelbaum and Cecilia Xuetong Feng) of exposed scaffolding and corrugated iron, Khamatova and Burkovskiy play two nameless lovers who spend their days in a whirl of slapstick and inane bickering. She says a snail and a turtle are the same animal; he disagrees. He bounces on a stack of mattresses that she’s sandwiched inside; she locks him in an imaginary bathroom; whenever they need someone to back them up in their frequent arguments, they each appeal passionately to their only friend, a large (real) goldfish bobbing stoically in a tank at the center of their destroyed room. Arguing is one of their primary forms of play, and play is all they have. Every so often an alarm will sound and they’ll freeze like hunted animals — or worse, something will explode outside and more dust, or worse, will fall from the crumbling ceiling. In Sasha Ageeva’s wonderful costumes, the pair look like zombified wedding guests, his tuxedo and frilly purple boutonnière and her blonde wig and sparkly dress caked in weeks (months, years?) of grime. It seems that one day, long ago, in a different world, they opened the door to go out to dinner together, or perhaps to the opera, and a bomb exploded on their doorstep. Like Looney Tunes characters, singed yet somehow alive, they shut the door and never opened it again. 

Now their lives are a haunted, claustrophobic cartoon, and Golyak revels in its theatrical opportunities. His collaboration with sound designer Denis Zabiyaka is particularly compelling, as the couple futz with an ancient radio that’s periodically brought to life by their shenanigans, or when Burkovskiy, himself a kind of human record player, smacks his own head to start a tune playing in the space. It’s the kind of galvanic seeming-chaos that’s choreographed down to the microbeat, and there’s real satisfaction in watching Golyak’s actors, both figure skaters in previous lives, execute its loops and axels. 

“Are you hurt?” she asks him desperately after one of the explosions outside rocks their bizarre little hideaway. He shakes his head and asks her the same: “Are you hurt?” It’s a moment of tenderness that adds ballast to the gymnastic clownery, as well as a crucial hint that these two survivors — and perhaps this is their tragedy — haven’t yet entirely lost their minds. They still care for each other, and for that expressionless fish, whose tank they cover with a busted door whenever they think the ceiling might rain plaster. That care is the sorrowful heartbeat of Delirium. It’s what the surrounding violence is trying to stamp out, and it’s what commits us to following when one of these acrobats of make-believe implores the other, “Go see if another existence exists.”

I’m Not Even Half is at the Bushwick Starr through October 31.
Delirium is at the Space at Irondale through November 7.