REVIEW: Body Unredacted tries to find itself in Williamsburg

Check your phone at the door, literally

Ulises Ramiro

Body Unredacted is a collaboration between Blessed Unrest's ensemble and two playwrights, Damen Scranton and Laura Wickens, plus direction and choreography from Artistic Director Jessica Burr. It’s a piece that's about a lot of things. Beauty, love, humanity, just to name a few. There’s a lot of nudity. I’m talking A LOT. The nudity isn't exploitative, though, and it compliments many of the core threads.

One of the strongest attributes is the surgeon and hospital sections. These work, and these sections are staged well as they align with the strongest relationship and the most important moments of reveal. Each actor delivers a bold performance.

There's some strong movement, some strong writing, some strong ideas and some strong threads, but overall, the work-in-progress feels all over the place. Some of the chaos works, jumbling threads and then re-aligning them - order vs. chaos - but some of the chaos feels like, at its center, the piece is saying, you figure it out.

At the beginning of the play there's a kind of rapid-fire lecturing about current, relevant, important ideas related to beauty, image and love. The ideas themselves are good, but the way they manifest as a lecture doesn't really fit in line with the rest of the play and it doesn't seem like it'd be too effective in persuading someone who doesn't agree.

There's movement and ways of fracturing everything that's avant-garde, and sometimes in a good way, but other times the piece feels too much like it doesn't exactly know what it is, and if you don't get it, then that's your problem. Conviction is a great attribute, but if the piece doesn't know what it is, then the conviction falls flat.

None of this is to say that Body Unredacted isn’t worth seeing. The piece manages to pull through an ending that mostly works, and brings many interesting aspects to fruition - a difficult feat for any show. It's an interesting spectacle, but it hasn't really discovered what it is yet.