Plays at Play: Palindrome

Excerpt from Student Review:

Palindrome is an absurdist play, written by playwright and novelist (and past Theater Dept. playwriting professor), Julia May Jones, and directed by Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater, Ji Won Jeon, featuring the talents of Penn Hoen ‘24, Aminah Hopewell ‘26, and Isadora Zucker ‘25. The play takes place in a museum, not far off from the Tang, with the actors physically moving around the space as they perform. At first, I found myself dazzled and confused by the strange sentences the actors spoke, but as the three actors danced around the space, making jokes about the miracle of birth, I was able to put the pieces of the puzzle together. The piece itself is a palindrome, except instead of having sentences that meant the same thing forwards and backwards, the lines took on different meanings when said in different orders, by different actors. As for the art pieces in the gallery, their presence in the space was a performance in itself, showing the faces of different strangers who, at first glance, we’d know nothing about. Palindrome was the best play to start the night off with, in my opinion, because it acted as the thesis for the whole event; how do our words and actions resonate with the people around us, and how are we connected to the people we consider strangers?