Picture a medical facility for the incurably depraved—a clinic where the patients are perverts and the treatment is confession. That’s the world playwright Borna Barzin drops us into with The Perverse, running Sept. 24-27 at Brooklyn’s Queer Nightlife Community Center (QNCC). “Can you change? Are you ever capable of it?” the Juillard graduate student asks of his set of characters, incarnated by Samuel H. Levine, Ken Barnett, N’yomi Allure Stewart, Hari Nef, and James Cusati-Moyer.
As the inaugural resident of QNCC’s Theater Residency program, Barzin is a downtown-to-mainstream oscillator, with a resumé that spans Lincoln Center to the Bushwick Starr, and a MacDowell fellowship that birthed the play’s foundational focus. Inside QNCC’s warehouse (reworked into a stage for the first time), audiences will walk past the bar, into a performance staged between towering columns and scored by DJ and music producer Lauren Flax. Ahead of the premiere, CULTURED sat down with Barzin to sound off on Edgar Allen Poe, perversity, and what it means to bring humanity’s darkest instincts to the stage.
I would love to hear what unlocked this project for you. What were you thinking about?
I actually wrote this never thinking it would be produced; I didn’t plan on sharing it with anybody. It had been sitting in my Google Drive for a long time. I was at a residency at MacDowell for three weeks, working on another project—a very traditional American theater play about belly dancers in Iran in the 1980s [Belly Dancing Lessons], which is funny because that’s also a practice I have in me. I finished that project while I was there, but I got stuck in New Hampshire for another week, and I read an Edgar Allan Poe short story called “The Imp of the Perverse.” I quote it [for The Perverse], and it inspired a character in the play.
It started with the idea of a specialized medical facility that treats the most sick and twisted perverts. That container excited me because it’s an environment where anything is possible—fantasy and reality living side by side in a shared space.
What’s your process when building these characters and their dialogue?
Honestly, I’m not a daily pages person. I strike when the iron’s hot. I’m more the type who gets excited about an idea, locks myself away, gets it all out, then re-emerges into the world.
When it comes to dialogue specifically—and this sounds a little crazy—it’s really written in my head, like voices talking to each other. I create the circumstances in my head and have a sense of who the people are, but I let the characters reveal themselves. After I write a scene, I’ll think, Oh, this is a neurotic person, or, This person’s brain works this way, and then I carry that into the next scene they’re in. I learn about them as I’m writing them. My style is very jazz. I get into these creative spaces where something is pouring out of me, and I just try to let it come out.
Beyond Poe, tell us about the other source materials and influences that shaped the narrative.
A big part of it is Poe, but another big and weirdly unexpected influence was the playwright Charles Mee, who’s a mentor of mine. He writes love plays, all about love in a very pure, true way. I was channeling him a lot because I wanted to play the opposite: This is a play about perverts seeking treatment, and I went to him because I was looking for the humanity and desire underneath it. I’m always trying to counterweigh things—to me, a play interrogating perversity and the darkest corners of our minds is more interesting if it’s not just about desire alone, but more holistic.
There’s a moment where one character challenges another, essentially saying, “Isn’t this so terrible?” and the other responds, “No, this is desire. You’re here to process and experience this in a safe space.”
What has it been like working with Jordan Tannahill, who championed the project?
I’m a big fan of Jordan’s. When the question first came up of whether QNCC should do a play, it was really Jordan and Hari who threw their weight behind it, saying, “Yes, this is the kind of work we should be doing, and yes, this is the one.” I was supported by amazing people who championed it. Jordan has been paramount in making it happen. He brought his edgy, taboo play to established American theater. My challenge is a bit different: Even though this play is edgy and taboo, and arguably more thematically relevant to the nightlife community than to a traditional theatergoing audience, I’m still bringing a play to a scene where people don’t necessarily go see plays as often. So having Jordan involved feels like being part of a legacy. It’s an honor.
There are nightlife-centric moments in the show—like techno playing in a stage direction, or the lights suddenly going dark. Is that part of the relationship you’re pointing to with the QNCC space?
It’s funny. I had that in the script even before I knew it would ever be produced, and now I think it could only be done this way. That’s part of why I loved working with QNCC—they’re all about doing the impossible, and doing things that can only happen there.
I’ve been imagining how it’ll live in the space: the performance downstairs, dressing rooms upstairs. Picture walking in—whether through the back, through the bathroom, or through the front entrance—you’re facing forward, the bar’s to your right, a chill lounge area to your left, and then there are columns, with the play taking place between them.
Late in the play, a character describes someone who can see “things you didn’t even know you wanted yourself.” I wondered whether writing this play felt like a similar exercise. Did The Perverse reveal anything about your own mindset?
Writing this play, I came to learn that there’s no changing who you are. You can change your ways, but you can’t really change your core self—though maybe you can change your environment, and that births a new version of you. It’s fun. You write a play, and then all these philosophical questions emerge. The characters have these perversions, these thoughts they feel they shouldn’t be having, and they want to be different people. So maybe through intelligence, or through acting out your most sick and twisted desires, you can change your ways—become who you want to become. I think that contributes to the underlying sense of helplessness in the play. There’s a current running through it: Can you change? Are you ever capable of it?
When guests are walking out at the end and turning to a friend, what do you hope they’re saying in that moment?
I have two different answers to this question. First, I hope people understand, culturally, what we’re doing. This is something really special—this is a theater production produced by [QNCC founders] Seva Granik and Michael Falco, who’ve done work with Bond Architects on the set, and Gum Gum Studios on lighting. These are the best in the game, and this cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary collaboration is genuinely rare. Even before I got into Juilliard—before any theater had said yes to me in this way, they gave me a full production—which has been amazing. It’s really an amazing opportunity for me to give back to the community that raised me. A lot of my 20s were spent in nightlife, and it’s given me so much—this is a way to give back to it. We’re being really intentional about weaving together those two worlds: theater and nightlife.
My second answer is that I really hope there isn’t one single thing people are talking about. I don’t write things to produce a take-away. I hope people enjoy their evening, and I hope it sparks conversation, but I don’t have a horse in that race. In the same way a painter doesn’t paint for a specific take-away, to me, theater is about catharsis. Theater should make people feel something. So I hope they leave having had a real human experience, and that they also appreciate the cultural work that went into it.
To close, can you tell us about anything that you were channeling during this process?
Something I didn’t fully touch on in the Edgar Allan Poe question—there’s a psychological taboo at play, and I think the piece uses taboo as a vessel to explore human nature. At its heart, the play investigates why people are the way they are and why they do what they do. That’s something that revealed itself over time—I used to think that idea of “taboo” was at the heart of the play, but now I feel it’s more about self-destruction and desire.
Something I was really channeling while writing was the importance of withholding information—letting the audience watch these different scenes unfold with no context for where they are or what’s happening. Even in early readings, people would be laughing and enjoying themselves, and then suddenly realize, TOh—this is where we are, and I was implicating them in that moment. That’s the technique: I’m going to tell you everything, but sit tight—you’ll learn what you need to know when you’re ready for it. By withholding, the play can turn on a dime. I love that about it: what you think it is becomes something else. You realize the root of something is actually deep emotional anger. The roots and origins of things are always surprising. New layers keep revealing themselves.
More of our favorite stories from CULTURED
Audacious Ghosts and Sunbaked Villas: How to Make the Most of 36 Hours in the Veneto
Is ‘I Want Your Sex’ Actually Gregg Araki’s Tamest Film to Date?
What One Angeleno Learned From a Six-Week Bender With the Downtown NY Art Scene
McNally Jackson’s Sarah McNally Breaks Down the Modern Bestseller
The Best Parks and Pools in New York, According to Luke Evans, Sohla El-Waylly, Bowen Yang, and More
Sign up for our newsletter here to get these stories direct to your inbox.
in your life?
