It’s a cliché to say, when offering a dissenting opinion of a work of art, that you watched an entirely different film/play/TV show/[insert form of art here]. Yet sometimes, the cliché is an indisputable matter of fact. I missed the chance to see Shayan Lotfi’s What Became of Us when it opened June 4th at Atlantic Theatre’s Atlantic Stage 2, when it was performed by Rosalind Chao and BD Wong, but finally had a chance to see it last week. Hindsight has made me hideously grateful for my habitual lateness. Critics invited to the opening week’s performances faulted the play for its “lulling quality” and “vague” performances—aspects that rarely revealed themselves in the show I saw. Or make that shows.
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Unlike the roughly first tranche of performances beginning in mid-May, last week’s runs of What Became of Us were billed as a “exclusive double-feature event.” Two pairs of actors took turns performing the roles of a sister named Q and her younger sibling, Z, who reminisce about their past. The first 80 minutes were anchored by Shohreh Aghdashloo and Tony Shalhoub, both superb in their roles of Q and Z, respectively; after an intermission, Rosalind Chao and BD Wong assumed the same parts. Not everyone might inclined to sit through a cumulative three hours of performance, but the experience was well worth it, even as Aghdashloo and Shalhoub delivered more finely shaded performances than Chao and Wong. A double-feature is, on reflection, the proper way to see Lotfi’s soul-stirring show. On the day I saw the two plays (or is it one........