Courtesy Public Theater
Meta? Maybe. Seven Methods of Killing Kylie Jenner (Public Theater to Jan 22) is the kind of title guaranteed for the internet to begin foaming over, should the invisible world of anger aggregators alight upon it and do their thing. 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. Those hanging fronds take on an even more piercing meaning when the text refers to lynching at one point.
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.