The Hiss reconstructs a Y2K Seattle house party through an unreliable narrator interrogating five witnesses, exploring whether truth is ever recoverable. A strong ensemble, a title-defining tape motif, and a genuinely earned central monologue make this distinctive, ambitious fringe work well worth watching.
Salt Lake City, UT—There is a particular kind of ambition in staging a memory play where nobody’s memory can be trusted, and The Hiss commits to that premise with real nerve. The play reconstructs a single night through the eyes of an outsider determined to assemble “the truth” from a room full of unreliable witnesses. It takes place on the night of the turn of 1999 into 2000, a house party in Seattle where something happened between five young people. It’s part Rashomon, part daytime-talk-show interrogation, wrapped in grunge-era Seattle nostalgia, and for long stretches it’s genuinely compelling.
The fairest way to judge a play built entirely around the question of whether the truth is ever really recoverable is to ask the same question of its own craft: does the method the play uses to chase that truth actually earn its meaning, or does it just accumulate?…