A good fight is like a well-choreographed dance. The combatants feed off each other’s movement and energy as the ebb and flow of power gives the affair a graceful energy. A good, dramatic two-person play is like a good fight. The characters come together for a shared dance but both find definition in the power they can extract from or must forfeit to the other.
“The Monsters” is a great play that feels at all times like an excellent, balletic fight. A world-premiere two-hander by Ngozi Anyanwu now running in Two River Theater’s intimate black box space in Red Bank, the play introduces us to a pair of siblings, each of whom struggles to balance a fierce independent streak with the emotional and psychological drives for family and companionship. Directed by Anyanwu, the production’s taught choreography beautifully captures the waves of forces like violence and tenderness, love and anger and dominance and vulnerability that define the fraught, evolving relationship between a brother and sister.
Subtitled “A Sibling Love Story,” the play opens as a mixed martial arts champion nicknamed “The Monster” defends his title in the octagon. Big (Okieriete Onaodowan), as we soon learn him to be dubbed by his younger sister, Lil (Aigner Mizzelle), dominates a minor professional fighting circuit through discipline, hunger and an utter lack of flashiness. Lil surprises Big by showing up after this fight in what turns out to be a tense, awkward scene. The two have not seen each other in sixteen years but Lil decided the time was right for a reunion. Big is surprised, reserved, defensive and only somewhere hidden deeply between the lines, happy to see his little sister.
The play progresses rapidly over a series of months as this relationship that had grown stale gradually revives itself. Anyanwu’s script offers brief flashbacks to childhood where we see a tender, artsy Big looking after the sister who is 10 years his junior, challenging an abusive father so she does not have to, encouraging her to succeed in school. We come to learn that Lil could have benefited from Big’s protection during the years of their estrangement but also that Big had to grapple with his own demons in battles not neatly contained within an octagon.
The play’s subtitle should not be read to suggest a saccharine, joyous reunion story. For Anyanwu, love is a struggle between caring for oneself, allowing another into one’s life and giving oneself in support of another’s struggles. That’s not easy. Sometimes the process feels like a hug. Other times it feels like a submission hold. Ultimately, “The Monsters” proves itself most interested in the uneasy tension between warm tenderness and explosive psychological violence that fuels a shared project to foster something that can be mutually fruitful in this relationship.
Two River enhances this tense dynamic by bringing audiences close to three sides of the play’s small playing space. Andrew Boyce’s set captures the intensity of a fighter’s gym as the lights (Cha See) and sound (Mikaal Sulaiman) transition the show in a moment from quiet sibling conversations to fierce battle. Choreographer Rickey Tripp and Fight Director Gerry Rodriguez offer several intense shadowboxing scenes during which Anyanwu and her cast make clear that the opponent is much more than simply an adversarial fighter.
Mizzelle and Onaodowan are most impressive in their excellent performances when they show the development of their characters working in relief of the other. In the opening scene, Mizzelle shows Lil to be awkward, unsure, and needy opposite a Big that Onaodowan crafts as stoic, confident, and standoffish. Over the course of the next two hours that power dynamic shifts and flows as these damaged characters struggle to give and receive love. Under Anyanwu’s sharp direction, Mizzelle and Onaodowan skillfully reveal considerable depth in their characters, often through small shifts in tone and subtle physicality. The play is at its best when it is developing between the lines the tensions that define these characters, leaving the most revelatory details to be understood as bubbling just below the surface of Lil and Big. Long late-play monologues eventually undercut the script’s powerful subtlety.
“The Monsters” shows that what might be best about a good fight or a good dance is that we cannot always tell whether conflict or collaboration fuels the choreography. Whether this show is a dance or a fight or both, it challenges audiences by refusing to define a dance leader or a dominant fighter. Instead, Anyanwu’s play dwells provocatively in the struggle for those mantles.