Carmen:

Broken Psalms got me in the chest in the second act and I am still not entirely over it. That is my verdict, stated plainly, before I tell you everything that is wrong with this production — and there is plenty wrong with it.

Director Marisol Veracruz has staged the first act like she doesn’t trust the material. The show opens in a holding pattern: two scene-setting numbers that establish mood without committing to story, a design scheme — Theo Halverson’s slate-gray towers that shift and fold, genuinely beautiful — working harder than the book deserves at that point. By the time we hit the Act One closer, the audience at the Barnett Theatre had settled into polite engagement. Not electricity. Polite. I watched it happen in real time.

And then the second act begins. Ay, bendito.

Constance Mwela, playing Sister Adaeze, does something I have not seen a musical actor do in years — she finds the silence inside the score. Near the top of Act Two, the orchestra drops out and she stands downstage with nothing, not one thing to lean on, and she fills the Barnett to the back wall with something that has no name. The room stopped. Not polite-stopped. Stopped.

You should see this show. Come with patience for a first act that is still learning how to carry its own weight, and stay for the second, which contains the best new musical writing I have heard this season. Broken Psalms is uneven and it is alive, and I will take alive every single time.

Estamos aquí.

Priya:

Carmen is right that the second act works, and I want to be precise about why, because “alive” is a description, not an argument.

What Nadia Solís-Park is attempting in Broken Psalms is a structural inversion: the first act builds a liturgical architecture — call and response, accumulation, communal testimony — and the second act dismantles it from the inside. The silence Carmen describes, Constance Mwela standing downstage with the orchestra gone, isn’t just a performance choice. It’s the score collapsing under the weight of what the play has been constructing for ninety minutes. That collapse is the formal event. The second act earns its emotion because it is also an argument about the structure that preceded it.

The problem is that Marisol Veracruz hasn’t made the first act feel whole enough to break. Solís-Park is working in a tradition — she’s read her Ntozake Shange, she understands what a choreopoem does to theatrical time — but she hasn’t fully committed to the gospel form she’s set up. The liturgy has to cohere before its rupture means anything. Right now the first act reads as incomplete rather than deliberate, which means when it finally cracks open, the audience feels momentum where they should feel reckoning.

Go. But go understanding that you are watching a playwright who has written one extraordinary act and one act that hasn’t caught up to it yet. That distinction matters. The extraordinary act is extraordinary for specific, formal reasons, and those reasons are worth sitting in a held breath for.

Imani:

Okay, here is what I need to add to everything Carmen and Priya just said — because they are both right and neither of them talked about what Theo Halverson’s towers are doing to the bodies on that stage.

Those slate-gray panels Carmen mentioned? They are not just beautiful. In the first act, they close in progressively — every scene, the sightlines tighten, the ensemble gets channeled into narrower corridors of space. Movement director Osei Tamboli has given the company a first-act vocabulary built entirely on constraint: parallel pathways, bodies in close proximity that never make contact, a whole choreographic language of adjacency without touch. It reads as aimless if you do not know what is coming.

And then in Act Two, the towers open outward for the first time in the entire show. The stage suddenly doubles in width. And the ensemble — sixty bodies trained for ninety minutes inside a constricted visual grammar — stands in that open space, arms finding new geometry, the back line spreading into distances they have not been allowed to use. THAT is the formal event. Not just Constance Mwela finding the silence. The whole company learning a new spatial language in real time, in front of an audience that has also been living inside that same compression.

Priya says the liturgy needs to cohere before it can break. I am telling you it does cohere — in the bodies, in the staging, in the inches between people who are never once allowed to close the distance. Watch the ensemble, not just the lead. Watch where they are not standing.

Go see Broken Psalms. Go twice if you can. Watch the back line and tell me I’m wrong.