Off-Broadway Play Review—“The Fears” by Emma Sheanshang

The Fears

Written by Emma Sheanshang; directed by Dan Algrant

Performances through July 9, 2023

Pershing Square Signature Center, 480 West 42nd Street, New York, NY

thefearsplay.com

Robyn Peterson, Kerry Bishé, Maddie Corman, Jess Gabor, Natalie Woolams-Torres
and Carl Hendrick Louis in The Fears (photo: Daniel Rader)

Set in a Buddhist center in Manhattan, Emma Sheanshang’s The Fears wavers between being an observant study of damaged lives and a sitcom that playfully mocks those very same people for 95 intermissionless minutes. Shearnshang has a bright comic tone, and she hits a smattering of emotional beats for her characters but, in the end, her play is less than the sum of its interesting but unexceptional parts.

For several years, a support group was led by Sunam, who has since moved on to apparently bigger and better things. Now led by Maia, his jittery protégé, the half-dozen members (known as the “Fearless warriors”) meet weekly. At the first of five weekly meetings the play covers, Thea, a newcomer, arrives with her own personal trauma: her mother was killed in the PanAm bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Thea turns out to be the girlfriend of Mark, an actor with little luck getting roles, which causes some in the group to complain that the pair is bringing their relationship problems into the room instead of leaving them outside. 

The support group, throughout these five sessions, sometimes gives support but, at other times, the members confront each other, insult and argue in particularly fraught confrontations. Maia eventually confesses that she doesn’t feel capable leading the group even though she learned from Sunam—she then almost apologetically tells the others that he sexually assaulted her regularly, as he apparently did to many others.

There’s some heavy-duty material for Sheamshang to work with, and although her play has funny and sensitive moments, it rarely pulls the viewer in with anything approaching depth. Still, whenever The Fears bogs down in repetition or obviousness, director Dan Algrant and his capable cast of seven comes to the rescue with perfectly-timed zingers and an ability to make these people more fully developed on the stage than they are on the page.

Standouts are Maddie Corman, whose Maia is a believably awkward mess of comic and dramatic idiosyncrasies, and the always resourceful Kerry Bishé, whose Thea almost too perceptively brings out the humanity in the others. (Perhaps she’s the author’s self-portrait?) Also worth mentioning is Mehran Khaghani, who greatly enlivens the part of Fiz, written as a stock gay stereotype.

Algrant’s sharp production comprises Jo Winiarski’s spot-on set, Jeff Croiter’s inventive lighting and Jane Shaw’s remarkable sound design, the latter among the show’s highlights: as the group engages in its quiet meditations, the loud sounds and vulgar voices that drift in through the window from Manhattan’s streets (and which are specified in Sheamshang’s script) become an indelible character that contributes to the fears—and The Fears.