A Review of The Relationship's Production of Khadijah Queen's Non-Sequitur

Nina Puro reviewed Khadijah Queen’s new play Non-Sequitur--winner of the 2014 Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Performance Writers (as we mentioned!)--for Weird Sister. The play, produced and directed by Fiona Templeton's company, The Relationship, "is a cutting rearrangement of stereotypes surrounding desire, identity politics, and the ways in which perception mediates relationships, delivered via shifting characters (often entities) lobbing short lines." If you are in NYC, you can still get tickets. Meanwhile:

Rows of white folding chairs are arranged around the runway. A white supportive column in the center of the runway becomes a prop and an impediment: a navigational pull, a stumble-block for awkward body language or alpha-beta brushes while navigating public spaces, a lean-to, a mast, a symbol of support and of precarity.

I was moved because Queen’s work expresses familiar valances [sic] and questions better than I’ve been able to: debt, trying harder, misapplied subjectivity, the commerce in sexuality, “revolutionaries,” internal monologues, world-building, the multiplicity of personas, the blurring of public and private, self-doubt, frustration, complacency, the vagueness in white protest—“THE BEAT POET,” “THE ROCK-KIKER,” “THE HABITUAL JUSTIFIER.”

Within this range of identities, building a family often occurs via approximation, failure, threat, systematized gaps, subcultures, diaspora. These static gaps between scenes felt to me as real as the scenes, akin to culture-shifting in everyday life. The lights going black weren’t traditional graceful segues into another dreamscape or transitions with chapter names or title cards. They were lived transitions: commutes, panic attacks, culture-shifts, rooms collapsing into rooms, heavy breathing in sleep—switches flipping in the brain, not just outside it.

Non-Sequitur is being published by Litmus Press as we type. Read the full review here.