A playwright claims her new play is not about her dad in ‘The Hypocrite.’ It very much is.

Jo Hamya’s “The Hypocrite” toggles primarily between the perspectives of Sophia, a 28-year-old playwright in London, and her father, a famous writer who is referred to, pointedly, only as “Sophia’s father.”

While her father attends a matinee of Sophia’s play, she sits above him at a rooftop restaurant, enduring a tense lunch with her mother. When the father gets a tour of the theater before the play begins, his guide tells him “[i]t’s very generous of him to come.” Hamya lets the word “generous” serve as a soft warning — to both father and reader.

The theater setting works in several registers. In a literal sense, Sophia’s father is in the audience. He immediately recognizes the kitchen onstage as the one in the house where he and Sophia spent a summer in Sicily. “[N]o memory could be so loyal,” he thinks; the sentiment arguably contains a shimmer of fear. “He is not sure whether he is supposed to be watching himself or not,” Hamya writes — a brilliant moment that questions not only Sophia’s intentions, but also the project of theater itself.

Hamya sporadically directs the reader’s attention to the technical aspects of the production; these, too, intertwine with her characters’ concerns. The play is available both in-person and via streaming. When it’s streaming, Sophia’s work “makes more sense […] It looks less like two pretend people on a pretend set.”

The novel’s concerns include memory and its distortions; the question of what is real and what is representative is at the story’s core. Hamya also makes room for the importance of housekeeping, a task left to an employee, Elena, while in Sicily, and to Sophia’s mother in London. Neither Sophia nor her father seems particularly invested in the daily work of tidying.

Tension builds both onstage and above it. Sophia’s memories of that summer, when she helped her father work on a book by taking dictation, conflict with her father’s. When she planned to spend the day with Anto, a boy neither she nor her father had met, the father’s counsel was to protect Anto, not his daughter: “It’s of absolute importance that you leave that boy intact […] I’ll thank you to avoid any breaking of hearts.”

Watching the play, the father’s thoughts on gender make him defensive. He has imagined conversations with other audience members that become, during intermission, a reality. One theatergoer tells him Sophia’s work is “nothing brave,” that Sophia is “making a show of reclaiming” the work of a privileged white man, so he is publicly defending his daughter while privately grappling with her work. Meanwhile, in the rooftop restaurant, Sophia asserts to her mother that the man in the play is not her father. “‘It’s a feminist play about men like him,’” she says.

This distinction pulses throughout the novel. “When the matinee ends, will he have a daughter?” the father wonders. The reader wonders if he expects forgiveness from his daughter, or if he believes he is in the position to extend — or withhold — his own forgiveness. Hamya’s complex and nuanced work invites both her characters and readers to ask questions that linger after the play’s third act.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy, whose debut novel, “The Other Wife,” is coming in 2025, is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

The Hypocrite

By: Jo Hamya.

Publisher: Pantheon, 231 pages, $26.