Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Embracing the chaos: In THE KICK INSIDE, Nicolás Noreña channels downtown avant-garde heritage, to gloriously uneven effect

• By drediman
• November 3, 2026
• No Comments

Over at HERE, you’ll find The Million Underscores’ production of The Kick Inside (the play’s title is named after Kate Bush’s early-career album from 1978). Conceived and directed by Nicolás Noreña, the Brooklyn-based company’s artistic director, this curiosity of a piece is a genuine attempt at channeling/recapturing the kind of absurdist, avant-garde theater that was once prevalent in New York’s downtown theater scene. Using a text that’s made up of the contributions of thirteen playwrights — including downtown legends like Penny Arcade and the late, great Richard Foreman — the play is necessarily a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts, and Noreña wouldn’t have it any other way. He embraces the chaos. In short, the work chronicles the increasingly surreal adventures of Alenka, a woman who decides to revolt against society’s limiting modes of communication, which takes her on a fragmented, labyrinthine journey across identities and even worlds.

With its plethora of physical moving parts (props, set pieces, Foley-produced soundscapes), the production is insistently manual and hand-crafted in its aesthetic, using intentionally ragtag stage techniques that experimental theater-makers of the 1960s and 1970s would have used. The show is largely viewed through disorienting and unreliably framed tableaus — as if it were a film being shot by a distracted child — that invariably leave key visual components of the larger picture out of the audience’s field of vision. In The Kick Inside, the physical world, including familiar locales like bedrooms and bus stops, feels anxious and utterly alive, quivering with anticipation before disassembling itself and putting itself back together in different configurations. Over the course of 90-minutes, Noreña’s pageant leads Alenka — and a motley crew that includes an alien and a talking dog — to increasingly bizarre landscapes (and increasingly fascinating use of space), eventually transcending our own world in favor the cosmos and beyond.

Given that each chapter has been penned by a different writer, the experience of watching the show can be a frustratingly haphazard affair, prioritizing pure excess over rigor. I’d like to think this was an intentional choice, more specifically the show’s way of questioning the notion of comprehension by artfully conveying a world slipping out of our grasp. As for the hardworking cast (led by Tatyana Kot, in a prismatic performance as Alenka), their commitment to eccentricity and Dadaesque randomness must be commended, even if their ensemble-driven execution of Noreña’s complex staging can sometimes veer awfully close to just plain messy. I’ll give their endeavor the benefit of the doubt, and describe their work as gloriously uneven. Despite my slight misgivings and confusion surrounding The Kick Inside, I can’t help but still recommend it if only to applaud its efforts — if not to keep a dying theatrical heritage alive, then to pay it a hearty homage.

RECOMMENDED

THE KICK INSIDE
Off-Broadway, Play
HERE / The Million Underscores
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Through November 7