M (Sasha Diamond, left) and L (Shannon Tyo) are ambitious high schoolers in Jiehae Park’s Peerless.
This young Off-Broadway season has already seen two new plays riffing on Macbeth, both written and directed by women and both having to do with college. Sophie McIntosh’s Macbitches, which wrapped its run at the Chain Theatre a month ago, was set in a university theater department that’s shaken up when a freshman wins the role of Lady Macbeth instead of the star senior. And now Primary Stages has debuted Peerless, Jiehae Park’s fast-talking dark comedy about Asian American siblings hell-bent on getting into the most prestigious university.
At a school dance, L (Tyo) gets between her sister and a rival classmate, D (Benny Wayne Sully). Photographs by James Leynse.
Unlike Macbitches, which talked about Macbeth but didn’t borrow its plot, Peerless does feature a protagonist nudged toward unscrupulous behavior by the person closest to them. Several other things from the Scottish play show up in Peerless: among them, portentous knocking, disrupted sleep for the guilty, and prophecies and a greeting of “Hail!” uttered by someone who could be described as a “weird sister” (the character’s name is Dirty Girl).
Park didn’t write in iambic pentameter, but her dialogue has its own distinctive rhythm: short, sometimes single-word lines spoken in a rat-a-tat cadence, with characters often finishing each other’s sentences or cutting them off. And late in the play she nods to Shakespeare when a character says, “You know what they say, ‘Where there’s a will’”—which, of course, to the audience sounds like “Where there’s a Will”—as well as with this exchange between the siblings: “If we get through tomorrow… Let’s talk tomorrow… That’s what I mean: tomorrow… Tomorrow’s tomorrow…”
Rather than a kingship, the protagonist of Peerless—a high schooler named M—covets admission to the elite university referred to only as “The College.” M and her sister L are twins, but L stayed back a year so they wouldn’t compete with each other and so L could eventually use “sibling preference” to get into The College herself. (If you’re wondering who’s who in the Macbeth parallel, take note of the initials.) M’s grades, SAT scores and extracurriculars are tops, but she’s counting on her minority status to secure admission, so she’s shocked when she doesn’t get in but a white classmate does. That white boy, it turns out, is one-sixteenth Native American.
L and M are not played by twins, but actors Shannon Tyo and Sasha Diamond achieve an impressive synchronicity that makes their “twin connection” seem real. It’s most evident in their singsong delivery of Park’s rapid-fire dialogue, though Diamond and Tyo convince you of a physical and emotional bond too. The sisters are always dressed identically except for different-colored shirts or hairbands, and the color coding (yellow for L, played by Tyo; red for Diamond’s M) extends to their backpacks. As similar as they appear, it’s when the sisters’ personalities diverge that the show is at its most suspenseful and mordant, and the actors play this aspect of this script as sharply as they do the chatty, in-sync twinning.
Peerless’s three other cast members also turn in fine performances. As the aforementioned witch stand-in Dirty Girl, Marié Botha is appropriately off-kilter as she skulks about and taunts M. Benny Wayne Sully is adorkable as an outcast choosing to embrace life and devastating in the last moments of a subsequent scene when he gullibly entertains L and M. Anthony Cason plays M’s boyfriend (character name: BF) as somewhere between laid-back and oblivious, either of which suits his character.
Dirty Girl (Marié Botha, left) makes some predictions for M (Diamond, right).
The repetitious patter in Peerless does start to get exhausting in the second half, but overall the play—directed by Margot Bordelon—is an amusing take on the hyper-competitiveness surrounding elite college admissions. With a cast of Asian, Native American and Black characters (e.g., BF), Park curtly but pointedly brings in a secondary theme: racial identity, particularly how it can be commodified or even weaponized. Her play may be modeled on one of the most famous dramas ever, yet it still offers some surprises in the final scenes. Sure-handed direction by Bordelon and cleverly deployed sound, light and props help sustain the pace and mood in a production where timing and visual elements are key.
Mextly Couzin’s lighting design ranges from disco-ball sparkle during a school dance to shadows encroaching on M’s conscience. And while cawing of birds and squeaking from rodents repeatedly signal evil and guilt, the sound design by Palmer Hefferan (Tony-nominated earlier this year for Lincoln Center’s The Skin of Our Teeth) also includes, of all things, the theme song from Cheers.
Peerless runs through Nov. 6 at 59E59 Theaters (59 E. 59th St.). Performances are at 7 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, with matinees at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets, visit 59e59.org.
