A palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same backward and forward: “Was it a cat I saw?” or “Dammit, I’m mad” or, my nerdy favorite, “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.” In Kallan Dana’s new play Racecar Racecar Racecar, which starts performances at A.R.T./New York on Friday (and runs through Dec. 22), a father and daughter on a road trip occasionally play a game of palindromes to pass the time, though they stick to one-word examples: noon, bib, sis, rotator, deified, and, of course, racecar and Dad.
Dana’s play is itself a kind of a palindrome: An unnamed Dad and Daughter set out from New York City (the first line is a shouted “Statue of Liberty!”) and head for California, then drive back. Along the way, though, the trip gets, well, trippy, as other characters intrude on their journey in increasingly abstract ways and enact oddly personal, sometimes troubling encounters. We are clearly in the realm of what is often called the language play—I was not surprised to learn, in a recent interview, that Dana’s advisor at Northwestern was Erin Courtney, herself a student and longtime colleague of language-play innovator Mac Wellman.
“I actually was thinking about her play A Map of Virtue a lot, which she refers to as having a bow-tie structure,” said Dana, a Brooklynite who originally hails from Portland, Oregon. “There’s this big central act of violence in the center of it,” with the rest of the play built around that incident. In Dana’s case, Racecar’s central act, set in California, seems to involve a Christmas party that devolves, with dreamlike illogic, into a quasi-hostage situation/family confrontation. Dana explained that in this section the play is meant to “break and explode, which then shifts what the return section is like.” In other words: The form may be inspired by a palindrome, but it definitely does not read the same in both directions.
It’s the kind of bold, feminist theatrical experiment that has become a specialty of the small NYC company The Hearth, run by Julia Greer, who also stars in Racecar. The tiny troupe kicked off in 2016 with Beth Hyland’s For Annie, and has since staged seven world premieres, despite Covid—in fact, they commissioned plays from nine writers during the pandemic lockdown. Despite the huge challenges of making art happen in NYC, Greer said, the flip side is that “being such a nimble and young and small company, we’re able to meet the moment.” When she was sent Racecar a year ago by both director Sarah Blush and by Dana’s mentor, the writer Julia May Jonas, Greer thought, “Wow, I gotta do this before anyone else does it, it’s so good.”
This month’s production almost didn’t happen for an entirely unforeseen reason: The Hearth had booked the Connelly Theatre, a historic Off-Broadway space in the East Village, for the premiere of Racecar Racecar Racecar. But in October, the theatre abruptly suspended operations after general manager Josh Luxenberg resigned when the building’s landlord, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, began to scrutinize—and veto—the content of the plays staged there. The new policy and subsequent shutdown led several shows to scramble for new venues. Becoming Eve, a New York Theatre Workshop production about a trans rabbi, was among the most prominent titles under fire.
Racecar was at first not in danger. Indeed, until the Connelly Center announced their theatre program’s suspension, Dana’s play was the only thing on the docket there, because, as Blush explained, they were the only ones with a signed contract. But even before their hand was forced by the Connelly’s closure, Blush said, they were looking for another venue “in solidarity with the other people who had been canceled. How odd it would feel to be the people who were permitted to be there.” So, Blush said, she and Greer “put our heads together and made a list of every venue in New York City and just started calling people.” A.R.T./New York was the one that came through.
While there is little in Racecar Racecar Racecar that jumps out as explicitly transgressive (unless it is read closely), it is nevertheless a work that centers women’s voices at a time when bodily autonomy is under increasing assault. As Blush succinctly put it, “I woke up this morning and thought: What a relief that we’re not doing this in the shadow of the Catholic Church.”
Indeed, neat palindromes aside, it seems we are in a time when reading forward is going to feel a lot different from reading backward.
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is the editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
