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Things that happened when I was 13: I played first-chair clarinet in my middle-school band.
He didnt open his mouth.
He would come out two years later and go on to model for Abercrombie & Fitch.
It was a big deal.
I was really good.
I thought I might go to college on a soccer scholarship.
By tenth grade Id stopped playing, overwhelmed by a coach who motivated us by shouting.Not good enough.
Get your head in the game.
Would you like to join the rest of us on the field?
Its a brave, visceral, excitingly off-kilter barbaric yawp of a play.
Its angry and its sad.
Its brash and its funny.
And it gets at something excruciatingly tender: the burden of modesty on young American women.
It feels like a playwright declaring her manifesto: No more apologizing.
No more downplaying my own talent.
No more choosingniceoverbrilliant,niceoverbest.
No more insidious, self-sacrificing, meek, accommodating, damagingfear.
And thats part of Barrons point: Being a teenagerisweird and dark.
Its a bloody battle.
And we carry its scars, both proud and ashamed of them, for the rest of our lives.
I am your god.
I am your second coming.
Feeling like thats all a littleintense?
(You havent even heard the cunnilingus part of the speech yet.)
One of the powerful twists ofDance Nationis its repossession of the idea of the monster.
Might it be Zuzu, who knows that shes good but not as good never as good as Amina?
Because I cry when I watch Amina dance.
Because of these varied bodies,Dance Nationbecomes unmoored from time, its story part memory and part prophecy.
These bodies are the women these girls will grow up to be.
The women still have the girls inside them somewhere, and, somehow, vice versa.
As Maeve, the troupes oldest and least dance-crazy member, the 60-some-year-old Ellen Maddow is particularly moving.
Not because she plays anything sentimentally; rather the opposite.
It sort of washes over me.
Like sleep, says Maeve calmly of her out-of-body experiences, And Im like: Uh-oh.
Im about to fly again.
It was the coolest thing I ever did.
And I forgot it.
He even taps her on the butt, in a gesture thats somehow both innocent and totally not okay.
Hes in his element but the minute she scampers away, he deflates.
I guess I should go home, he sighs, without moving.
And with Amina, both Barron and Shihabi are doing something special.
Its okay, if I lose.
I dont mind this time.
Like I feel like I hurt people just by existing.
Men are conditioned to own their talent, their ambition, their space.
Dance Nationis at Playwrights Horizons through June 3.
