Ny Times

Ben
Brantley

April 16, 2017

Even the air aches with mystery in Richard Maxwell’s “Samara,” a sense of life as a teasing and unresolvable riddle. The sounds that saturate this hypnotic fable of a play, which opened on Sunday in a Soho Rep production, suggest the music that fills your mind when you’ve been encased in silence for too long – the sort of noises your imagination might conjure if you were lost for days in a desert. Such a landscape is the setting for this uncanny tale of nomads adrift, directed by Sarah Benson and featuring an exquisitely subliminal score by the country-rock eminence Steve Earle. And as is usual in recent works by Mr. Maxwell, one of the great original voices of experimental theater of the past several decades, “Samara” seems to be situated at the corner of the everyday and eternity, where the earth meets the sky and mortality is a force of gravity. “Old land, wild land,” is how a character called the Manan (Becca Blackwell) describes the view. “I can still see pagan and enchanted time, back to Arab time. Uncontrollable desires, relieved and saved, held by, barely contained by God, and magic never quite quelled.”