Maia Novi applies humor, and Goop, and also Andrew Lloyd Webber, to her fraught experience as a drama student.
Two imperious blondes haunt Maia Novi throughout her play Invasive Species: Gwyneth Paltrow and Eva Perón. At drama school, Novi is told that she needs to shear off her Argentinian accent and try to imitate Paltrow’s crisp-as-a-summer-blouse American one. (Specifically, Novi keeps listening to Paltrow’s narration of her Goop morning routine, played over the theater speakers so many times that you’ll pick up the inflection yourself.) Then, after Novi buckles under the pressure of school, seeks treatment for insomnia, and is abruptly sent to a New Haven psych ward, Evita enters the picture. Alternating — and sometimes overlapping — with scenes in the hospital, there are scenes of Novi as a star on the rise, cast in some splashy studio production of Evita with a British director who keeps telling her, “No, don’t use that Gwyneth voice or even your normal accent; give us something ‘authentic.’”
The pressure to assimilate (Paltrow) while seeming authentic (Perón) — specifically, to give people the performance of what they think of as authentic (that version of Perón, after all, was written by a couple of Brits) — form the interlocking teeth of Invasive Species, a sprightly romp through the destruction of the self. Novi, who based the play on her own experience at Yale Drama, and her director Michael Breslin (of Circle Jerk) keep the pace quick as the play flits between several realities and temporalities, cross-cutting between surreal postcolonial satire and grim reality, as her supporting cast — a fine-tuned crew of Raffi Donatich, Sam Gonzalez, Alexandra Maurice, and Julian Sanchez — cover multiple roles.
Novi gets stung by the acting bug (embodied by a slithering Sanchez in a literal insect mask; he gives a similar sliminess to Evita’s British director later on) while watching The Amazing Spider-Man as a kid, which makes her disdain Latin American movies and dream of a career in the U.S. She tries out clown school in France and then lands in New Haven among vapid and cutthroat Americans, their eyes gleaming with dreams of landing agents and turning red from all the coke they do. The Americans alternatively fetishize Novi for her foreignness — on a date over tacos, she convinces a hapless American bro that her family is tight with the narcos — and tell her to tamp it down, cut the accent, and conform. Then, when Novi is hospitalized and initially doesn’t know what is happening, the satire falls away: She’s stuck in a ward with a trio of teenagers and a dictatorial nurse (Donatich, also domineering as Novi’s agent, a nice resonance), struggling to understand how she’s gotten there and how she can get out. She can’t remember any phone numbers other than her parents’ (Gonzalez plays both mother and father, in a giant hat and a golf outfit; they’re both grandly useless). She keeps trying to explain to the staff that her behavior isn’t a sign of mental illness, it’s just what it’s like being an actor.
Given that, in character, Novi is obsessed with a forthcoming acting showcase, it’s fitting that Invasive Species, now running Off Broadway after a stop at the Tank last summer, acts as a meta showcase for herself as an actor and writer. In white pants and a tank top, she struts around with confidence, whether as a newbie drama student not realizing she’s landed in a big and threatening pond or as a parodical Evita, a performance enhanced by Breslin’s clever Dior-shaped shadow projections on the wall behind her. But while Novi is comfortable and charming in bombastic absurdity, she can also scale down in scenes where she’s trying to connect with the teenagers around her in the ward, or when delivering a monologue about the origins of her invasive thoughts.
While Novi tends to be affecting and real in those moments — in a way that’s appropriately charged, given her play’s skepticism of the “authentic” — they’re also scenes where Invasive Species tends to retract its claws. When she explores the lives of the teenagers around her in the psych ward, there are stretches of observation that are honed but not thorough, and we don’t escape the feeling that the teens are always seen at a distance. Of the several parts she plays, Alexandra Maurice is most significant as Akila, a queen bee of the ward (she has some sort of Jell-O monopoly) who befriends Novi and provides a dark, funny speech about an attempted overdose. But Akila’s presence fades amid the play’s building mania — she becomes, at the point where Novi needs to arrive at her thesis, primarily a conduit to that crucial realization.
Novi has certainly thought carefully about re-creating those scenes in the ward. Her script cites Spalding Gray’s landmark Rumstick Road, a performance about his mother’s suicide, and notes that “situations in this play that are based on real events and real people should be treated with respect, dignity, and compassion.” That respectfulness, inarguably right as intention, sits awkwardly with the mania of the Hollywood and drama-school satires. Novi aims to use humor to tame the trauma, but the flow sometimes reverses, and the trauma makes the elements of the satire that aren’t well grounded seem all the more weightless. I kept wanting to know more about Akila and the other kids, more about the weird power dynamics of the ward, and less about how annoying your classmates can be. There is a limit on how interesting it can be to hear Yale people tell you how toxic Yale is (and this production is solidly Yale/Geffen-forward, from cast to directors to producer Jeremy O. Harris), and let alone to hear an actor describe their frustrations with a scatterbrained agent. Invasive Species moves fast and intends to please. By the end of the play, Novi wraps up her many threads quickly and neatly. It sent me out on a high, but it left me with the feeling there was so much more to be said — not just about those scenes in the ward but also when Novi approaches and then backs away from further discussing her mother’s mental illness. It put me in the position of a drama-school teacher giving that annoying post-performance note: Strong start, but you could dig even deeper?
Invasive Species is at the Vineyard’s Dimson Theatre.
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