What happens, “The Rehearsal” asks, when people who struggle to find connection and meaning attempt to achieve it by layering their lives with the scrim of performance?
The opening gambit of “The Rehearsal,” on HBO, is deceptively simple. “I’ve been told that my personality can make people uncomfortable,” the show’s creator and host, Nathan Fielder, explains, in a voice-over, as he enters the apartment of a middle-aged man named Kor. “Shoes off? . . . Shirt off?” Fielder cracks to Kor, adding, in his narration, that, when meeting someone for the first time, “every joke is a gamble.
This is just the beginning of the performative refractions of reality that Fielder sets in motion. He arranges a way for the Tricia impersonator to meet the real Tricia, in an intricate scheme that involves the actress posing as a bird-watcher, so that she can mimic Tricia more accurately.
“The Rehearsal” relies on the same dynamics that made “Nathan for You” work; both shows foreground Fielder as an apparently vulnerable, receding weirdo—his shoulders a touch hunched, his graying hair molded into a tech worker’s slablike coif—who also happens to be uniquely skilled at manipulating the people around him.
Watching “The Rehearsal,” I marvelled at Fielder’s ability to beat a premise into the ground harder and more inventively than I’d ever seen before. There is something intensely comical, and demented, about the disproportionate effort at play here, the enormous labor devoted to minor, otherwise much more easily solvable problems. But there is also the potentially ugly issue of control.
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