THEATER
• King of Shadows
• A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Oh What War
• Three Changes
• 4 Adults Only
FILM
• The New York International Independent Film and Video Festival
• Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived
Q&A
• 'Grey' Area
A health expert turned filmmaker makes his East Coast premiere
CULTURE VULTURE
• Culture Vulture

I (Heart) Kant
Written by Ken Urban
Directed by Dylan McCullough
At The Linhart Theater
440 Lafayette St., 3rd Floor
212-969-0499

Reviewed by Maya Avrasin

To understand Ken Urban's I (Heart) Kant is to know what it means to have a sublime experience. Sublime can mean many things, but for the purposes of this New Jersey-set tale of four disparate women, the word suggests converting something inferior into something of higher worth. As the play begins, we are introduced to the inferior lives of its four female leads: Linda (Kate Benson) is a lonely philosophy student who can’t finish her dissertation on Immanuel Kant’s "Critique of Judgment"; Betsy (Frances Mercanti-Anthony) is a confused young woman who acts out internal moral struggles by going to bed with anything that walks, including her brother; Pam (Edelen McWilliams) is an uptight businesswoman; and Maureen (Kate Downing) is a lost, drug-addicted substitute teacher. The four women encounter situations that cause their characters to go head to head with their respective issues and either overcome or succumb to them.

Armchair philosophers: Kate Downing and Edelen McWilliams in I (Heart) Kant.

The beauty of Urban’s play is that it transposes Kant’s theory of the four types of judgment (agreeable, beautiful, sublime and good) into these women’s plotlines. Moreover, Urban moves his story beyond its heady subtext to explore frustrations familiar to suburbanites: the pursuit of happiness, love, success and acceptance. Lee Savage’s set design, meanwhile, plays a key role in the production, creating four separate scenes on one stage. The versatile set allows Dylan McCullough’s direction to shine, since much of the show's action requires overlap among its characters. The only instance where McCullough's direction serves to confuse rather than enlighten concerns Pam, who for the first half of the play is presented as the busy single mother and terminal workaholic. Every other female character in the play has a sublime revelation, but Pam's is never fully realized — or at least that is what we have to assume since the character dies before reaching that point. In an even stranger twist, Pam unexplainably bounces back to tell us her story (perhaps this was supposed to be a flashback?) and then falls back into the other realm as a ghost.

I (Heart) Kant is the first play in Urban’s New Jersey Trilogy (Halo and Nibbler follow) and is perhaps the most ambitious of the three in both ideology and direction. And while you don’t have to be familiar with Immanuel Kant's famously arcane theories to enjoy the play, having some knowledge of the philosopher's work will help you appreciate its subtleties.