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Cults have seldom been so robustly represented in popular culture. We have the Zizians, the Sarah Lawrence sex cult, Nxivm, and the cult of Mother God, with each dutifully unpicked in articles and docuseries. Now a new Off Broadway play examines another such group.
Nazareth Hassan’s Practice covers the cult of Asa Leon (played by an imposing Ronald Peet), a charismatic multidisciplinary theater artist auditioning actors for a new, purportedly radical company. As we learn through a podcast clip played aloud as a voice of God, Asa and their husband, Walt (Mark Junek), have used a “genius grant” to purchase a historic African Methodist Episcopal church in Brooklyn. Not only have they converted the space into a functional theater, but they’ve also added apartments and a communal kitchen to house the members of the company, all of whom live and work together during an eight-week intensive led by Asa themself.
Through breathing exercises, guided meditations, and group trauma shares, Asa whittles down the actors’ individual forces of will until there’s little left beyond the collective. Then, their methods become more extreme, including gaslighting members of the company into confessing to misdeeds they never committed and forcing them to high-knees run to the tune of Jessie J’s “Bang Bang” until one miserable, submissive Brit (Omar Shafiuzzaman) throws up. In the ensuing, chilling silence, Asa wheels out a mop and forces him to clean up the mess himself.
While the violence depicted onstage is explicit, it plays with subtler, more familiar archetypes in the art world, a space rife with cult-of-personality figures who wield their social capital and cachet like weapons. Shortly after Practice began previews (its opening night is set for November 18), I sat down with the playwright and director Hassan—also the author of this year’s buzzy Bowl EP—to talk about abuses of power in theater, how to write for shorter attention spans, and why we’re all more susceptible to cult tactics than we’d like to think.
Vogue: How do you feel? You must be in the thick of it.
Nazareth Hassan: Sunday was our fourth preview. I’m still making cuts here and there, because when you’re making something that long, you’re battling against a low-attention economy. So we’re trying to make every single piece of information feel as purposeful as possible, like doing surgery on the scenes.
I mean this in the most complimentary way possible, but I almost thought of that Chantal Akerman clip where she’s talking about how she wants her movies to be long because, when you’re watching them, she’s taking your time back, if that makes sense.
When I was writing, I thought a lot about slow cinema—how in that kind of film, there’s a little bit more appreciation for something that lets you come back into your body and be present with the thing, be observational.
I’m curious about the writing process for this play. What was it like to write it?
Do you mind if I smoke a cigarette? I’m sitting by my window. I wrote this about two years ago, coming off a really hard time in my life, when all my expectations for my career and body were being reconfigured. Like a lot of artists, I ended up on my ass. Part of that had to do with the way I was experiencing power in the theater—how artists are perceived, treated, and handled.
At that time I was working on a play about reparations that involved asking the actors their own feelings about reparations. It got me thinking: What is the worst thing I could do with my own power? What is the violence of this work? What is my shadow self in this space? So it was a means of trying to understand how this thing that I love [the theater] could end up being so perverted in certain ways.
I am hyperfixated on performance in theater, sometimes unhealthily so. So whenever something painful happens within it, it takes me a long time to come back from it. So I wanted to turn that question on myself.
At a time when we’re seeing this cultural backlash and a political backlash on the state level, where people are trying to insinuate that artists, especially Black artists and queer artists, are ridiculous—to parody this artistic world even in that environment is a commitment to truth that I found really compelling. Did you struggle with that at all, creating this villainous character, Asa, and showing them onstage?
There are obviously people choosing to be violent. But there are also people being swept up in something because they don’t necessarily acknowledge their own capacity for violence. And part of this play was thinking about inheriting violence. Where does it go? What do we make of it? In Asa’s case, for example, he’s married to his [former] teacher. He’s inherited this sense of abuse and predatory behavior. And ultimately he makes a conscious attempt to repurpose it. I suppose it makes me feel that anyone is susceptible to becoming violent based on their own experiences. That’s really hard for people to accept in themselves.
That metatheatrical element almost invites the audience to ask where you, as the playwright, sit in relation to all these characters. Do you feel ready for people to ask if Asa is you?
I was very nervous. It is scary to look at your own power. There probably isn’t a director who will watch the piece and not see a little bit of themselves in it. There is a real ubiquity in how directors are taught to treat actors.
But if I really wanted the theater to be what I know it can be, to separate itself from power, then I would have to be able to do that for myself. There’s a sense of just trying to gather all my experiences and synthesize them to look at, acknowledge, and move beyond.
The place where we start is so familiar to a lot of the audience—these kinds of therapy-speak refrains that Asa uses to brainwash the company, like, “I’m useless, and that’s okay,” and “Don’t apologize, just examine and respond.” How did you escalate from these mundane, Mel Robbins–esque violences to the truly absurd?
People are laughing at that scene, but when I watch that part, it’s not funny. Part of what people are laughing at is a feeling of absurdity. But the things that happen toward the end are—well, I did a lot of research on cult tactics, and part of what’s interesting about the play is that people really don’t take cult violence seriously.
At a certain point, the violence and brainwashing become so isolating that you’re not able to defend against it. You’re too far deep. It’s really easy to distance ourselves from what cult violence actually is, especially in a time when those tactics are being used politically on a larger scale.
I felt like there were a couple of references to recent works, and I could be reading way too far into it, but I did wonder: Were those choices—like the mirrored stage Asa brings on behind the company in the second act—inspired by something that you’ve seen in past years that you wanted to bring into conversation here?
The second act was like, How can I distill everything that’s happened in the first act into this really forward, absurd, post-dramatic, maybe Brechtian gesture, where everything feels like exactly what it means?
Asa is finally being completely transparent about his intentions and desires. And the mirror idea came from that. There’s a distortion of how these characters are seeing themselves now. He’s brainwashed them, in a sense.
I also spent a good amount of time working in Germany. And those kinds of gestures, like people in a glass box, are pretty—I wouldn’t say ubiquitous, but they’re popular. That was something I was also thinking about. Like, if this person is going to Germany, what is the reference to that theater culture that is the most flagrant?
In the preview I was at, two probably high school–aged boys were in the row behind me. During the second act, they were whispering to each other that the staging looked like AI. And I loved that reading. We all have the capacity to make an infinite number of avatars now. As a playwright, how does that strike you and what do you hope people take from the show?
Well, in regards to the AI question, a large part of my thesis for the play is that theater is one of the first gestures of virtual life—creating the world as one person, as a programmer, sees it. A friend of mine named Lucas wrote an essay that is gonna be coming out soon about Practice that refers to [the play] as feeling like “The Sims.” And the through line of theater as manipulation, as a prosthetic world separate from our own, has a kernel of these ideas about AI and video games or anything that gives us a simulacrum.
I want people to walk out with a deeper understanding of these tactics because the thing that makes them successful is how hidden they are. They thrive off being obfuscated. You hear a lot of deprogrammed cult members talking about how long it took them to actually regain a sense of objectivity about their experiences. And that’s the most insidious part about cult tactics and manipulation and psychological abuse. So my goal was to be so painstaking and detailed about, in the first act, laying out exactly how this could happen—how someone could take someone else’s trauma and use it against them. And then, in the second act, lay it out as quickly and crassly as possible. I hope that works.
How do we get out of that cycle of violence in a space like theater, where artifice is essential to the form, so it almost feels like manipulation is embedded in the experience?
I don’t know. Writing this play was the first step of that. It’s really an easy trap to fall into. For example, communes had these idealistic, leftist political values and started with these anti-capitalist principles, and then ended up replicating violence and control. It’s easy for that to happen on any level.
So before any of that really can happen, we have to look inward, within our desire to use violence in our relationships and lives. It’s a condition of being a human being, as opposed to a non sequitur. We commit many small violences every day, like ignoring a homeless person or gossiping. These little violences make up this larger tapestry. And by acknowledging and curbing those behaviors in ourselves, maybe we’ll actually get somewhere.
The show really evokes that in the audience, in a profound way. It even makes you think about the voyeurism of being in an audience in the first place.
That’s what I was thinking about with the laughter—the willingness to engage in cruelty. Because I was like, This is gonna be dead silent and jarring for everyone. And it just wasn’t giving that. Maybe we’re more desensitized to cruelty than I thought.
There is something incredibly sadistic about being in an audience. The play made me think about it in a physical way—the fact that I’m sitting here for my pleasure, watching people run around. When you step back, that’s unbelievable. But being forced to sit with that is a really challenging and ultimately productive theater experience.
Part of my goal with the play was to expose the labor of performing. When you show up to a play, you see people who are experts and professionals, right? They’ve learned how to manage their bodies, minds, and emotions. You are basically not privy to how that is really taxing.
Part of it is also the producing structure Off Broadway—the very intricate dance of money and how it is structured and how that influences the need for overexertion of an actor, performing six days a week, eight times a week. Those are things that theater making does not necessitate, but the industry does.
Actors exert themselves really intensely for your pleasure. That was something we talked about a lot in the rehearsal room. Not only “How can we manage your exertion?” but also “What is your relationship to exertion and the audience’s relationship to it?”
It goes back to where we started, in a way: We watch so much stuff that’s basically smooth brain. But I don’t wanna watch Cocomelon. I wanna watch something where I can tell this is hard.
There’s the thesis of the play, and there’s the metathesis, which is how it relates to the people in the room and the making of it. And my metathesis was, like, how can we make a play about trauma that we probably all share without repurposing it and while still getting close enough to process it? Our time together has been really fruitful in that way. The cast has become friends, and we’re able to really talk about our experiences and start to build healthier relationships to this thing that we love. That’s been my favorite part. Being able to be with them and break some of our experiences down [in hopes that] when we walk into our next process, our expectations of how we’ll be treated are different. Our ability to advocate for ourselves will be different. That’s the most gratifying part.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Practice runs until December 7 at Playwright Horizons’ Judith O. Rubin Theater. Hassan’s debut collection of poetry, Slow mania, is out from Futurepoem this fall. Their next play, Kat, will premiere in London in March 2027 at Theatre503.