‘Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner’ Is Murder Most Clever
Meta? Maybe. Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner (Public Theater to Jan 22) This is the title that the internet will start to foam over if the invisible world of angry aggregators decides to take it up and do their work. The subject of Jasmine Lee-Jones’ brilliant play, directed by Milli Bhatia, is about the same—the deliberate act of propagating anger on the internet to nourish one’s own notoriety and sense of importance, and the human and other results of doing so.
The play, which comes laden with awards from London (including the Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Most Promising Playwright Awards, and the Alfred Fagon Award)—is also about racism, friendship, queerness, and Black beauty. Overarching it all—on stage in front of us—is a kind of monstrous, Babadookian, though white, canopy of rope with dangling strands; the internet symbolically made into a bridal veil meets hell’s mouth. The text at one point refers to lynching, so the hanging fronds have an even more perilous meaning.
Turns Out Kylie Jenner Is Not a Billionaire. Who Honestly Gives a Shit?
Cleo (Leanne Henlon) is the one who is tweeting out the death threats for likes, but, as she makes clear to her concerned friend Kara (Tia Bannon) what she was really trying to do was a cultural critique, infuriated by the news, which Forbes reported in 2019 that Jenner is the world’s youngest “self-made” billionaire (and which was later shown not to be correct). And so the written-in-anger tweet thread begins, and while the play interrogates very big themes and very big pain, around Black identity and the co-option of Black identity, it’s also very funny and moving.
The relationship between the two women—and how Kara vocalizes her own queerness and her anger at Cleo’s past homophobia, which she also expressed online—is particularly strong. Both you root for them individually and together. The play doesn’t tie anything up with a tidy bow; the racism that Cleo rightly identifies as so permeating the culture is given a historical anchor. The audience is the focal point and subject of the most critical gazes at the end.
Seven Killing Methods for Kylie Jenner Excellently written and performed. Technical snafus ruined the production for around 50 minutes. Then, it took 15 minutes to get things sorted. It is a testament to the quality of Henlon & Bannon that it didn’t matter at all (during the 50 minute performance with the lights and microphones out-of-synchronch, the actors just kept going). Seven Killing Methods for Kylie Jenner cohered can be described as a powerful and concise piece in theater.
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