Review: The Visitor Doesn’t Recognize the Contemporary Elephant in the Room

The Visitor is ultimately about powerlessness, a fable of despair that illustrates how nothing changes if only one man does.

The Visitor
Photo: Joan Marcus

Widowed, washed-up economics professor Walter (David Hyde Pierce) wanders into the middle of a nationwide metaphor when he finds a couple of strangers living in his long-vacant NYC apartment at the start of the Public Theater’s new musical The Visitor. Walter reluctantly decides to let them stay, and Tarek (Ahmad Maksoud), a Syrian American drummer from Michigan, quickly warms to him, offering Walter lessons on the djembe. Tarek’s Senegalese girlfriend, Zainab (Alysha Deslorieux), isn’t so sure that their new roommate can be trusted. In welcoming Tarek and Zainab into his home, Walter shows generosity that America will not: When Tarek is arrested on a trumped-up charge, his uncovered immigration status reroutes him to an ICE detention center.

When the 2007 film The Visitor premiered, it sought to alert viewers to the plight of undocumented Americans in the context of a post-9/11 Islamophobia still in its first years. Perhaps such a story resonated as a needed wake-up call then, but the basic premise that a college professor could be clueless to the inhumanities of ICE now registers as wildly implausible. Even if the musical were clearly positioned as an historical piece, which it isn’t, there’s little dramatic pull on a 2021 audience in watching Walter amble toward allyship.

The musical’s book writers, Kwame Kwei-Armah and Brian Yorkey (who also wrote the lyrics), do very little to meddle with Thomas McCarthy’s screenplay. In the biggest departure from the film, Tarek has now been in the United States since early childhood (he arrived as a young adult in the film). Director Daniel Sullivan shared in mid-pandemic interviews that Tony-winning actor Ari’el Stachel—who departed the production, apparently contentiously, early in the preview period—had successfully advocated for Tarek to speak unaccented English.

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But not much else has been done to flesh out Tarek beyond that reminder that many immigrants have known no other home than America. Through the attempted de-centering of Walter’s coming-of-wokeness narrative, the men and their friendship end up feeling slight. Maksoud and Pierce play their scenes together compassionately and often movingly, but Tarek’s investment in Walter’s musical enlightenment seems overemphasized and abrupt: “Don’t forget our drums,” Tarek sings passionately from detention. “We’ll play together soon.”

Buoying The Visitor, though, are a pair of wise, warm performances from Deslorieux and Jacqueline Antaramian as Tarek’s mother, Mouna, who connects with Walter as they strive together to save Tarek. Deslorieux, like Danai Gurira in the film, offers a layered performance, sculpted from the trauma of a journey to the U.S. that leaves her guarded with Walter. She sings forcefully—it’s Zainab who translates most convincingly to music—but she’s also saddled with some of the show’s most clunkily literal lyrics as Zainab describes the assault she suffered: “But the price of the voyage was steep/They would touch me when I was asleep.”

Antaramian’s Mouna, meanwhile, reveals a glinting sense of humor and a gentleness that she would wish to share more generously, perhaps with Walter, if circumstances permitted. We only ever see either women in the shadows of situations that limit how fully alive they can be.

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As with most projects with music by Tom Kitt, there are stellar, stirring vocal arrangements, here supported by Jamshied Sharifi’s orchestrations. But the songs, which tend to last too long and say too little, underscore the film’s unsuitability for this kind of adaptation. At one point, there are three musical numbers in a row about Walter learning to play the drums.

Jan A.P. Kaczmarek’s score for McCarthy’s film is scarce and purposeful, with bursts of drumming emerging from long periods of claustrophobic naturalism. That seems critical to the way that the film’s drumming metaphor functions that the world of The Visitor is one largely missing music, or at least sorely undervaluing it. Inviting Walter into song from the get-go seems like a misstep here, not to mention the detainees’ vigorous dance number with steps reminiscent of Newsies. Thankfully, the ICE officers don’t harmonize.

The Visitor, though, is ultimately about powerlessness, a fable of despair that illustrates how nothing changes if only one man does. In the film’s final stirring moment, the roar of a subway drowns out Walter’s drumming: What good does it do if only one man makes his voice heard? The musical, by contrast, doesn’t address the contemporary elephant in the room, the question facing those who come in comprehending full well the pain that their neighbors continue to experience: What if everyone knows and everything still stays the same?

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The Visitor is now running at the Public.

Dan Rubins

Dan Rubins is a writer, composer, and arts nonprofit leader. He’s also written about theater for CurtainUp, Theatre Is Easy, A Younger Theatre, and the journal Shakespeare. Check out his podcast The Present Stage.

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