This

GRADE: B-

By Melissa James Gibson. Directed by Daniel Aukin. Playwrights Horizons. (CLOSED)

Critics for the most part applaud Melissa James Gibson's witty writing for This, a play about a 30-something New Yorker dealing with the death of her husband, though a few critics write that some of the characters are undeveloped. As is often the case, critics see certain aspects of the play in a different light. Variety's Marilyn Stasio is frustrated by the lack of plot development, but this uncertainty is exactly what New York Post's Elizabeth Vincentelli likes about the play.

Backstage A+
(David Sheward) Gibson wisely keeps them from turning into whiners and gives them such expressive zingers as "I hate the word 'blog'; it sounds like a large accumulation of snot" and "I have no problem with self-involvement, except in others." They fight their battles of raging emotions with words as weapons. The vague title refers to the uncertain state of affairs created by their messy feelings. "What do we do about this?" asks Jane when Tom reveals his longing for her. Fortunately, the playwright is as specific in dealing with her characters' inner conflicts as her title is general. Director Daniel Aukin balances the razor-sharp observational comedy with naturalistic staging. Louisa Thompson's lived-in set, which looks like you could move right in, contributes to the lifelike atmosphere.

CurtainUp A+
(Elyse Sommer) Unlike sic and Suitcase which were staged at SoHoRep, a favorite with downtown theater goers, This introduces Melissa James Gibson to a broader audience at Playwrights Horizons' larger and considerably more comfortable Main Stage. Fortunately, the playwright has made the move uptown together with her SoHo Rep director Daniel Aukin and design team. Much of what makes This enjoyable to watch again owes a debt to their high energy, creative staging. With a larger playing area to work with, Louisa Thompson has created a very detailed and versatile loft apartment that accommodates such varied locations as Marrell and Tom's home, a park, the hallway of Jane's apartment, a jazz club and a TV studio — all mostly by means of some moving panels and a portable door. With the help of Thompson's evocatively lit set (kudos to Mark Frey) and by having the actors move the props as needed, Mr. Aukin achieves the scene to scene shifts quite seamlessly and without time consuming blackouts.

The New York Times A
(Charles Isherwood) The author of the quirky, cult-appeal comedies “[sic]” and “Suitcase,” both seen at the downtown powerhouse Soho Rep, Ms. Gibson graduates into the theatrical big leagues with this beautifully conceived, confidently executed and wholly accessible work, which is not just her finest to date but also the best new play to open Off Broadway this fall. Its confused but lovable characters are drawn with a fine focus and a piercing emotional depth; the dialogue sparkles with exchanges as truthful as they are clever; and as directed by Daniel Aukin, Ms. Gibson’s longtime collaborator, and performed by a flawless cast, the play’s delicate pace, richly patterned wordplay and undercurrent of rue combine to cast a moving spell that lingers in the memory, like a sad-sweet pop song whose chorus you can’t shake. This is entirely appropriate for a play about how we process love, hurt and loss by concocting tidy stories to recall our experience, or reshape it — and sometimes to frame a happier future too.

Associated Press A
(Michael Kuchwara) "This," which opened Wednesday at off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons, is a startling work, canny in the way it slowly draws you into the lives of five people creeping through middle-age. The writing is intellectually quirky yet emotionally satisfying. And if you think the subject matter sounds maudlin, don't worry. "This" is surprisingly tough-minded and funny, too.

Newsroom New Jersey A
(Michael Sommers) Up-and-coming author of the Obie-winning "[sic]" and "Suitcase," Gibson crafts very amusing, very actable conversation that somehow sounds like everyday currency. From a funny verbal party game in the first scene that neatly engages viewers and sets up the story, all the way through to a heartfelt closing monologue by Jane, Gibson's quick, cunning way with words is striking. Of course, viewers who don't care to listen will simply find "This" to be talky.

New York Post A-
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) A large part of the play's appeal is that you're never quite sure what it's about or where it's going. The prospective romance between Jane (Julianne Nicholson) and Jean-Pierre (Louis Cancelmi) is quickly dropped. The attraction between married Tom (Darren Pettie) and Jane is revealed, then put on the back burner, though it may or may not have lasting consequences. Alan (Glenn Fitzgerald), craving love, steps to the forefront -- until we go back to Jane, who realized she never properly mourned her husband.

Theatermania B+
(Brian Scott Lipton) While each of the actors adds an invaluable element to the production, This does rest on Nicholson's slender shoulders. There are a few times when one isn't entirely sure if the actress is skilfully underplaying the part and showing us Jane's disconnectedness or if she hasn't grasped the import of what Gibson is trying to convey. Still, she handles the character's most crucial moments with a true sense of what it means to be a human being whose moral compass may have temporarily pointed in the wrong direction, but which is sure to return to its correct position.

Entertainment Weekly B+
(Tanner Stransky) This is a beautifully written, intelligent, and funny two-hour descent into the disarray of life. In some ways, Gibson unearths the plight of thirtysomethings in NYC much as the musical Avenue Q did for the city's twentysomethings — with the same bawdy humor. The subject matter — from the search for love to raising children — should hit home for any feeling person who isn't sleepwalking through life. But the way the friends act and relate — often with overly witty word choices and debates, reminiscent of the way Rory and Lorelai talked in Gilmore Girls — tends to feel inauthentic and fictional.

The Village Voice B+
(Michael Feingold) Occasionally, Gibson contrives a touch too baldly—her tormented souls just happen to have as their best friend a gay memory expert—or overworks a verbal tactic. Long stretches of beautifully vivid writing fall into brief gray patches of repetition, which might easily have been trimmed out except that her director, Daniel Aukin, was apparently fixated on some peripheral, and thoroughly superfluous, fancy business involving set pieces. Luckily, these minor visual nuisances can be ignored, since Aukin hasn't neglected his central task: getting from his cast five uniformly affecting performances, rich, detailed, and sensibly unshowy.

Time Out New York B-
(Helen Shaw) Oh, how the subversive can be subverted. Melissa James Gibson, author of the delectably weird plays [sic] and Suitcase, finally gets the glitzy production she deserves—and pop! The air goes out of her oddness. Did she deliberately turn her hand to more conventional fare? Or did some alchemy of uptown production convert her linguistic fairy gold into dross? To be fair, Gibson’s relationship drama This is leaden only in places, and joy can still be had from her delicate, pointilist dialogue. But considered in its entirety, This could easily be mistaken for any number of interchangeable thirtysomething-inspired thats.

Newsday C+
(Linda Winer) These people apologize constantly and are always complaining about being sleep deprived. The friends include a gay Jewish sardonic sidekick, a stock character we haven't seen in weeks, and a black woman who stops the action twice to sing plaintive pseudo-Laura Nyro songs. Gibson still writes articulate people, but, this time, her story and its emotional content feel both scattered and slick.

Talkin' Broadway C-
(Matthew Murray) Eleven years after its final episode aired, Seinfeld amazingly maintains its grip on our cultural language. The latest example, This, Melissa James Gibson’s new play at Playwrights Horizons, is one of the baldest yet. Paying adoring homage in every way except the deep seriousness of its underlying intent, it captures exactly that classic TV show’s super-slick aesthetic but not much of its magic... Gibson has chiseled some brilliant jokes and repartee into her play, but they never quite fit comfortably within the plot’s darker, starker dramatic framework. The loss, the anger, and the disintegrating trust that drive these people are conducted apart from the comedy, so the two halves are constantly battling rather than helping each other attain new heights. If pressed, I’d say the drama loses, because it has the furthest to go. But so many of the gags are in-and-out, two-second affairs, it can’t be said there are any real winners.

Variety D+
(Marilyn Stasio) What's not to like about "This," a dark little friendship dramedy by Obie and Kesselring Prize-winning playwright (for "[sic]") Melissa James Gibson? The characters -- a tight group of friends who play well together despite their private griefs and unaired secrets -- are personable and, in scribe's snappy dialogue, extremely articulate. Under Daniel Aukin's direction, the performances in this character-driven play are also virtually flawless. But here's the rub: there's no true "this" about "This," which has little action and less plot, no character revelation worth the wait, and ultimately no cohesive point to emerge from all the clever palaver.

NorthJersey.com F+
(Robert Feldberg) Except for Jean-Pierre, who's presented as a role model of passion and purpose, everyone is anxious, dissatisfied and confused about where life is taking them. Their situation as representatives of a generation isn't terribly original or stimulating. And as individuals, they're so sketchily drawn they barely have identities beyond their names. Director Daniel Aukin warrants blame for not integrating the original moments more vividly into the rest of the play. He can also be called out for the lackluster performances, although Gibson's periodic attacks of the cutes certainly don't help the actors.

Lighting & Sound America F+
(David Barbour) For the rest of two acts, the four characters get together in various combinations for conversation, usually with drinks, while Jane worries about the ticking bomb of her adulterous secret. This would be fine if the talk were more amusing or the people more interesting. Too much of the time, however, the dialogue doesn't get beyond low-level cocktail chatter. "I hate that the word 'blog' sounds like a large accumulation of snot," says Jane. "My career is an American movie and what I've just now realized is it wants to be a foreign film," muses Alan. "I want to pick your brain," somebody asks. "Sounds messy," is the reply. This approach is especially unhelpful in trying to illuminate the reasons why the characters are stuck in neutral. "Death is such a killjoy," says Jane, who can't quite let her deceased husband go. Alan, who capriciously decides he wants to be a humanitarian -- probably because he thinks Jean-Pierre is pretty hot -- wonders, "How do you break into doing good?" When Jane and Tom's little secret is finally let out, the impact is fairly nil, because everybody is too busy trying to crack wise.

Bloomberg News F
(John Simon) Worse than a play that is merely poor is one that is also annoying. Such a play was Melissa James Gibson’s “[sic]” and such now at Playwrights Horizons is her new one, “This.” You may find the title suspect, but what else can you call a play that is about nothing? Gibson reveals herself as a master of cuteness, smugness and pretentiousness. “This” begins with a kind of word game played by the five characters... The word game is stretched beyond our tolerance, as is everything else here. There is infinite repetition, talk about and around talk, jejune word play, not very funny verbal one- upmanship and the least possible action, most of it unconvincing.

Backstage A+ 14; CurtainUp A+ 14; The New York Times A 13; AP A 13; Newsroom New Jersey A 13; New York Post A- 12; Theatermania B+ 11; EW B+ 11; The Village Voice B+ 11; TONY B- 9; Newsday C+ 8; Talkin' Broadway C- 6; Variety D+ 5; NorthJersey.com F+ 2; Lighting & Sound America F+ 2; Bloomberg News F 1; TOTAL: 145/16 = 9.06 (B-)

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Circle Mirror Transformation

GRADE: A-

By Annie Baker. Directed by Sam Gold. At Playwright's Horizons Peter Jay Sharp Theater. (CLOSED)

Annie Baker's follow-up to Body Awareness shares the Vermont locale of that play and gives the playwright a sure-footed debut at Playwright's Horizons. The worst anyone can say about Circle Mirror Transformation is that it is "sneaky" (TONY, Backstage) and even that adjective gets deployed admiringly. A community-center acting class brings together a quartet of old and young locals to explore the craft of "being present." The content-less nature of the theatre games winds up channeling the real-life, off-stage drama of the characters in a masterful (perhaps sneaky) use of subtext over text. Tracee Chimo gets multiple shouts-out for her scene-stealing teenager Lauren and the ensemble, design and direction receive high marks as a whole, too. Some critics seem compelled to temper their enthusiasm in case their readers aren't as hip to the acting-class antics as the opening night crowd, but check out David Barbour at Lighting and Sound America to see how even non-actors are won over by this production's unpretentious charms. As Adam R. Perlman sees it, "Baker gives us the rare theatre-centric play that's not self-obsessed."

Backstage A+
(Adam R. Perlman) Smartly, sneakily, Baker gives us the rare theater-centric play that's not self-obsessed. "Circle" is about real people exploring their lives through tiny leaps of faith and creativity ... Sam Gold's direction is as effortless and excellent as the performances. Each actor has his or her time center stage, but here the smaller moments, the reactions, register just as much. I'll not soon forget Chimo's wide-eyed mix of disgust, embarrassment, and arousal upon encountering two classmates in an intimate moment. Just as memorable: Friedman visibly storing rage in his throat like some sort of a ticking frog bomb. That the play is slight, even shrinking in its aftermath, is among its many improbable strengths.

That Sounds Cool A+
(Aaron Riccio) The question is not whether Annie Baker’s new play circle mirror transformation is any good. The question is whether a play set entirely in a Vermont adult community center’s six-week creative arts class can connect with an audience of non-actors. The answer to the first question—it's not just good, but excellent, as in the best new play I've seen all year—is also a resounding answer to the second: work this honest and genuine is universal, regardless of theme ... Baker's provided an incredibly detailed script, flush with detail, but it's Gold who has figured out how to make all those details thrive, who has distilled an entire week of events into a piercing glare, and who has managed to make the simplest of acts--walking through a room--bustle with character. Everyone has to walk before they run, but Gold's direction here gives the entire cast (already marathon runners, each of them) a healthy head start.

Nytheatre.com A
(Nathaniel Kressen) Baker creates a story that is often surprising, delicately crafting poignant moments not through theatrical fireworks but rather built on nuance ... The five-person cast is outstanding ... It is worth mentioning that Chimo's performance thrived on the night I attended the show, through her use of body language and facial expressions. In a final scene of the play Lauren emerges from her defenses and transforms into a confident, radiant young woman. With Chimo's masterful touch, the scene yields a huge payoff. Sam Gold's direction is more than capable. He employs pauses to great effect, especially noteworthy at the top of the play. Comedic elements are timed perfectly. Design from David Zinn, Mark Barton, and Leah Gulpe creates a naturalistic yet evocative world in which the action thrives.

New York Times A
(Anita Gates) Annie Baker’s absorbing, unblinking and sharply funny “Circle Mirror Transformation,” presented by Playwrights Horizons, shows us people doing deliberately wacky things in a dance studio. The artificiality of the acting games just emphasizes the naturalness of the characters’ real lives and feelings ... Sam Gold has directed with an uncommonly observant eye and ear. The cast is uniformly winning, but Ms. Chimo’s Lauren stands out as a symbol of childlike authenticity.

New York Daily News A
(Joe Dziemianowicz) The production at Playwrights Horizons delivers on the promise Baker showed in 2008 in "Body Awareness," her Off-Broadway debut. Just 28, she's got an original voice, appealing quirkiness and an astute sense of what makes people tick ... It's a somewhat familiar story, but the writer's approach makes it fresh. The contributions of director Sam Gold can't be overstated. The cast inhabits their parts so completely it's like you're peeping on the actual class.

Talkin' Broadway A
(Matthew Murray) Watching them stumble through a variety of exercises that have them miming explosions or molding their classmates into scenes from their life may be hilarious, especially as rendered by an astute director (Sam Gold) and cast of effortless comedians. But when they all start accepting themselves and getting into character, the play pays off in a big way, going far beyond the belly laughs it spends so much time convincing you are its only goal ... Gold, working on David Zinn’s pitch-perfect dance studio set, guides his actors to raucousness and insight with equal facility - he makes the most of Lauren’s knack for always being in the wrong place at the wrong time, knows how to pull taut the invisible cords of tension that increasingly bind the characters, and transforms the sensitive, surprising final scene into an unexpected tearjerker. And his cast is superbly chosen.

Associated Press A
(Jennifer Farrar) Director Sam Gold gives a light-hearted air to much of the production, garnering nuanced laughs out of the exercises and the students' insecurities. Baker develops her characters slowly through their interactions each week in class, which is the only place we see them. Naturally, their real, offstage lives gradually infiltrate the classroom, revealing insights and transformations both humorous and heartbreaking.

Variety A
(David Rooney) On the page, this might be amorphous, living and breathing only with the gentle massaging of a magic-fingered director and an intuitive cast. It gets both in Sam Gold's no-frills production for Playwrights Horizons ... The characterizations display a miniaturist attention to detail that goes down to the bone, and the actors convey as much in a look, a gesture or an awkward silence as they do in words. Baker is never blind to their weaknesses and faults, yet regards them all with a warm, empathetic eye. Arbitrary as it is to single out anyone in such a seamless ensemble, Birney ("Blasted") continues to impress as a gifted stage actor, his affectless delivery smartly contrasting his deep well of feelings. And Chimo is a real discovery; Lauren's puzzled sneer and deadpan judgments are responsible for many of the play's generous ripples of humor, but the actress never pushes for laughs. Real or imagined, her personal evolution in the final week-six exercise is extremely touching.

Time Out New York A
(Adam Feldman) The play’s organizing strategy is almost perverse: It depicts major life changes in the most low-key and off-angle ways imaginable. (The silences here—and there are many—speak louder than most of the words.) Sam Gold’s excellent production for Playwrights Horizons honors the painstaking naturalism of the script, greatly abetted by David Zinn’s perfect rehearsal-room set and an exceptional cast of five that also includes Heidi Schreck, Reed Birney and Peter Friedman.

Light & Sound America B+
(David Barbour) Watching this, I felt sentenced to hell. It didn't help that the audience was loaded with actors who greeted each bit with peals of laughter. I gritted my teeth in expectation of a nearly two-hour inside joke. Then, however, I start to chuckle a bit, then a bit more. It wasn't long before big laughs were coming with surprising regularity. By the halfway point, I had completed a circular transformation of my own, convinced that I was seeing a thoroughly original little comedy of artistic manners. The playwright, Annie Baker, has given herself a tough assignment, and darned if she doesn't just about make good on it.As expertly directed by Sam Gold, the untold embarrassment caused by these unwanted revelations detonates one appalled laugh after another. The entire cast is adept at Baker's deadpan humor, especially when they're following Marty's lead with something less than enthusiasm. The funniest is Chimo as Lauren, who is fast losing patience with Marty's controlling ways ... David Zinn's rehearsal room setting is a photorealistic representation of the real thing, and his costumes tell you something about each character without seeming like anything other than everyday wear. Mark Barton's lighting cleverly underlines the script's many jumps in time, and Leah Gelpe's sound design fill the tiny pauses between scenes with realistic effects, including traffic and birdsong.

Village Voice B+
(Alexis Soloski) Yes, Marty's sessions tend more toward Explosion Tag than serious scene study, but that does not trouble the splendid five-member cast—Reed Birney, Tracee Chimo, Peter Friedman, Deirdre O'Connell, and Heidi Schreck. Under Sam Gold's direction, each offers an affecting, nuanced performance. These amateur dramatics resemble a master class ... As in Body Awareness, Baker treats her characters with compassion, almost to excess. The play's final scene is devastatingly gentle. I wish Baker wouldn't so quickly truncate awkward moments or curtail confrontations, yet it's this kindness, combined with a psychological acuity, that lend her plays their distinct voice.


On Off Broadway B+
(Matt Windman) In addition to highlighting the awkward, repetitive, seemingly pointless nature of most theater games, the play works well as a sincere character study taking place in a quirky context. While theater insiders will surely indentify with its contents, outsiders might find it all absolutely bizarre. Sam Gold's production is marked by strong performances displaying eccentricity and shared feelings of frustration and loneliness, but without feeling overplayed. One standout is Deidre O'Connell, as a 55-year-old acting teacher who attempts to be enthusiastic in spite of apathy, misunderstanding and betrayal from her students.

New York Post B
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Baker's tone and pace ultimately prove too gentle -- there is such a thing as killing a play with kindness. But the finely- tuned ensemble cast transcends the material. Under Sam Gold's sensitive direction, the quintet displays tremendous nuance and generosity -- in coarser hands, some of these characters could easily have been caricatures. Birney, Friedman and O'Connell are familiar local gems, but the other two are revelations. Schreck, a downtown regular, makes an assured transition to a mainstream stage. And Chimo ("Irena's Vow") turns out to be a master of the comic silent reaction.

Theatre Mania B
(Andy Propst) Classes in creative dramatics reveal more than talent for a group of relative strangers in Annie Baker's charming, but never completely satisfying, Circle Mirror Transformation, now at Playwrights Horizons' Peter Jay Sharp Theatre ... For anyone who's been involved in theater, Baker's play will provide no real revelations about the power of theater games. But anything that the work may lack in terms of insight into this subject is more than compensated for by the subtle challenges it provides the performers, whose main job is to create the inner lives of their characters ... Thankfully, the performers rise to the challenge in director Sam Gold's detail-rich production, ultimately providing theatergoers with a certain voyeur-like experience.

Curtain Up B-
(Elyse Sommer) Luckily for this no-frills little play, the cast couldn't be better. The always vibrant Deirdre O'Connell is terrific as the group leader, as is James (Peter Friedman who was also in Baker's first major Off-Broadway play, Body Awareness) as the husband who is also enrolled in the class and to whom she's no longer happily married. Reed Birney's Schultz and Heidi Shreck's Theresa, the group's star hoola hooper who actually worked as an actress before she moved to Vermont, are totally convincing. The fact that both are scarred veterans of recently ended relationship doesn't bode well for their attraction to each other. Tracee Chimo is a riot and so good that at times she threatens to steal the show ... The problem is that at almost two hours without an intermission, this is a case of stretching a comic conceit beyond it's limits. While director Sam Gold is well attuned to the playwright's quirky sensibility, he would have done well to curb her self-indulgently drawn out script. Consequently, the many long silences, and the repeat of the exercise that has the ensemble lie in a circle counting slowly from 1 to 10 tend to become tedious so that while some audience members will find it all endearing and hysterically funny, a few will make an unobtrusive escape around the halfway mark which is too bad as the last half is the best.

The New Yorker D+
(Unattributed) Annie Baker’s latest play is about five amateur actors taking part in a class of theatre games over a period of a few weeks. Through their minimal exchanges and their improvisational role-playing, Baker seems to think she is revealing subtext; what’s really on display is glibness. The aimless show doesn’t build or flow but trickles out in a facile and wearying jokiness. The revelations of character, when they are finally served up, are imposed, not earned. The trope of an acting class is potentially fascinating material; but even a solid cast, especially Tracee Chimo, who plays the sullen teen-ager among the confused adults, can’t save this evening from its suffocating smugness.

Backstage A+ 14; That Sounds Cool A+ 14; Nytheatre.com A 13; NY Times A 13; NY Daily News A 13; Talkin' Broadway A 13; AP A 13; Variety A 13; TONY A 13; Lighting & Sound America B+ 11; Village Voice B+ 11; On Off-Broadway B+ 11; New York Post B 10; Theatre Mania B 10; Curtain Up B- 9; New Yorker D+ 5. TOTAL: 186/16 = 11.63 (A-)

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The Retributionists

GRADE: D+

By Daniel Goldfarb. Directed by Leigh Silverman. Plawrights Horizons. (CLOSED)

Critics can't help but compare (at least in passing) Daniel Goldfarb's tale of four star-crossed Jews plotting revenge against the Germans, based on a true story, to Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. Most critics find the former to be melodramatic and laughable rather than insightful. Leigh Silverman gets mixed reviews for her directing, but most critics agree that the play is staged nicely, aided by Derek McLane's set. On the acting front, Margarita Levieva as Anika gets the harshest reviews for what critics call a wooden performance.

Talkin' Broadway B+
(Matthew Murray) The politics and the eroticism alternate in the first act much as the scenes set in Paris and Germany do. Goldfarb has a lot of ground to cover, and wastes little time in putting all his ideas on the table. If the first few scenes feel somewhat burdened by excessive exposition, the payoffs in the second act are ripe: When one plan fails, another is implemented, and the unions that once seemed so certain reconfigure time and time again. Silverman has directed with a sharp eye for pacing and a sharper ear for irony that elicits the maximum sexual and psychological suspense from almost every scene. (She’s defeated only by Goldfarb’s one extraneous scene, a flashback to the war that restates a lot of information from elsewhere, but doesn’t say a lot that’s new.) Even Derek McLane’s set contributes, seamlessly transforming from a shabby hotel room into an elegant train car and, eventually, the bread-packed bakery where the future of Germany may be decided. Goldfarb falters most noticeably in the weightier, more message laden sections of his dialogue; the characters’ single-minded determination makes for a lot of resonant-voiced but hollow-sounding proclamations that keep the actors from injecting it with all the portentous and pulse-racing color it needs. The most natural is Milioti (much better here than as a Fran Drescher-esque Syrian teen earlier this season in Lincoln Center Theater’s Stunning), who displays a sensitive understanding of unrequited adoration that plants Dinchka as the story’s unlikely tragic center.

CurtainUp B+
(Elyse Sommer) As promised by the advance press notices, The Retributionists is a romantic thriller, if at times leaning a bit too heavily towards soap opera. Given the limitations of a live theater piece, don't expect the kind of sturm and drang action of a film. The play's focus is on the conflicts and romances among the play's leader Dov (Adam Driver), Anika (Margarita Levieva) and Dinchka (Cristin Milioti), the two young women who became his lovers and followers during their harsh years in the forest, and the Aryan-looking Jascha (Adam Rothenberg). That said, this is a remarkably well- staged, extremely fluid production, with scenic designer Derek McLane transporting us without a lot of prop moving fuss to a Paris hotel room, a railroad train, a German bakery and, briefly, as well as to the forest where the foursome first bonded into a complicated family of sorts. Peter Kaczorowski's lighting and Tom Kitt's incidental music enhance the unsettled post-war aura. Director Leigh Silverman hand is most noticable in the way she spotlights the doors to Arika's Paris hotel rom, the train, and the bakery to perhaps symbolize their opening the way to both danger and possibility, beginnings and endings. Goldfab's script has enough little details to make the human behavior patterns and culture that developed during this foursome's years in the woods believable. The effect of the overlapping love relationships on the outcome of the thriller angle— the revenge plan, or to be specific, Plan A and Plan B — has enough surprises to hold our attention even though this hardly a gasp-inducing, finger clenching action piece.

TheaterMania B-
(Barbara and Scott Siegel) Inspired by a true story that occurred in Nuremberg, Germany in 1946 when 1,900 German prisoners of war were poisoned by arsenic-laced bread, playwright Daniel Goldfarb has spun an intriguing revenge fantasy in The Retributionists, now at Playwrights Horizons. Nonetheless, the play feels as if it needed another draft before going into production. There are great scenes, wonderful moments, and fascinating and breathtaking moral complexities that suddenly flash and then get mired in mediocre melodrama.

Time Out New York C-
(Adam Feldman) Goldfarb’s dramatic machinery is solidly built, and features interesting shifts in power among the play’s central quartet of Holocaust survivors. His language, however, moves distractingly between sepia stiffness (“You’ve always manipulated me so”) and modern lassitude (“I’m scared shitless”); and although Leigh Silverman’s staging is handsome, she elicits widely varying performances from the cast. Adam Driver and Cristin Milioti, two young actors to watch, do very fine work in demanding parts. But Margarita Levieva, in the pivotal role of Anika, gives a blank, inadequate performance—sometimes forcing the intense Adam Rothenberg into frantic spurts of compensatory acting. (He’s like a squash player returning his own shots at the wall.) Anika is meant to drive the story; Levieva never gets it out of neutral.

Lighting and Sound America C-
(David Barbour) The production's designers have conspired to give the play a voluptuous, film-noir sheen. Most of the action takes place in the train car and hotel room, both conjured up by Derek McLane with ease, using a few modular scenic pieces linked by a common door. The designer's skill at using a few telling details to create a strong sense of place has proved especially useful here. And, when the action moves to that bakery in Nuremburg, that stage is opened up to create yet another distinctively different location. Most of these locations are set against a basic set-up in which rows of black street lights run upstage to downstage, creating a kind of shadowy, back-alley look. Peter Kaczorowski's lighting endows the action with the requisite noir glamour; the hotel scenes in particular have a lovely sepia-toned quality. The forest flashback scene glitters with moonlight. Susan Hilferty's costumes include some beautifully tailored men's suits; her costumes for Dinchka are especially revealing of changes that characters life at three different points in the narrative. (I'd love to know why Anika is always barefoot, however.) Jill B. C DuBoff's sound design provides solid reinforcement for Tom Kitt's attractively melancholic piano-strings melodies; she also comes up with some extremely realistic train-station sounds. For all of this good work, however, The Retributionists remains one of those how-did-it-ever-get-on bafflers. Goldfarb's characters learn that the road to hell is paved with good intentions -- words he might well take to heart.

The Village Voice D+
(Michael Feingold) Some grudging praise should be offered to Daniel Goldfarb, for writing The Retributionists, and to Playwrights Horizons for producing it: A young writer willing to tackle a big, somber historical subject is always a sign of hope. Regrettably, the results here don't justify the praise being any more than grudging. Goldfarb's characters—four young Polish Jews who have survived extermination by escaping to the forest—scheme in 1946 to implement their personal revenge for the Nazi death camps by slaughtering an equivalent number of postwar Germans. To say that Goldfarb doesn't understand what he's talking about might itself be too generous: His people, their circumstances, their various pasts, and the chaotic postwar world around them are all so sketchily conveyed that I literally have no idea what he does or doesn't understand.

The New Yorker D
(Hilton Als) In the perhaps too orderly world of Daniel Goldfarb’s imagination, interesting things can happen, but not when the author’s in control. A literary sprinter by nature—his first acts have an almost staccato rhythm, as the absurdities pile up—Goldfarb sags when he has to go the distance. It’s as if some sense of duty were compelling him to pump his plays up, to push them through second acts and beyond the bounds of their natural, modest lives. This is a drag not only for the audience but for his characters as well. Too often, the thirty-six-year-old Goldfarb confuses the theatre with the lecture hall. This didacticism makes his new play, “The Retributionists” (at Playwrights Horizons), feel both empty and bloated; and it ends up trivializing what would have been a riveting story, trapping the actors in a narrative that doesn’t encourage freedom, artistic or otherwise.

Variety D
(David Rooney) Derek McLane's stylish, minimal sets, Peter Kaczorowski's noir-tinged lighting and Tom Kitt's fretful interstitial music combine to evoke a 1940s movie-ish atmosphere, but Silverman's direction is entirely without tension. However, the writing is mostly at fault, with dialogue that's often too contemporary ("He kills me!") and sometimes risibly melodramatic ("I want to get you pregnant on this train. This train heading into Germany. This train whose final destination is an enormous gas chamber.") All credibility is shot by the time we get to the bakery scene, in which the tone lurches into comedy with Lusia Strus and Rebecca Henderson as German workers who appear to have wandered in from a "Laverne and Shirley" rerun. But even without such head-scratching moments, this unconvincing play makes it hard to buy any of these phony characters as the impassioned would-be avengers of an attempted genocide.

Associated Press D-
(Michael Kuchwara) The dramatics are clunky — whether they are dealing with the personal lives of these four main characters or their convoluted plans to poison those German soldiers. Chronologically, the play is jagged, jumping around in time (including flashbacks) to give theatergoers a sense of what brought these conspirators to these plot. Director Leigh Silverman, aided by Tom Kitt's ominous music, keeps things at a full boil but it's an awkward kind of agitation. Tension is all. It makes for exhausting, unsatisfying theater.

The New York Times D-
(Charles Isherwood) Mr. Goldfarb seems to sense that this kernel of historical material will not suffice for a stageworthy evening. To supplement the story of the killer bread he supplies two overlapping romantic triangles. Unfortunately even this extra dose of yeast does not do much to improve the dramatic recipe of “The Retributionists.” As both a historical inquiry into the ethics of the “eye for an eye” brand of justice and a romantic melodrama, the play is a boring bust... formulaic soap opera dialogue fills far too much of Mr. Goldfarb’s play, which has been directed with minimal fuss but little apparent conviction by Leigh Silverman. “I can’t get you out of my system, Anika,” Jascha says. “I still love you.” In between the romantic tussling the characters do manage to engage in a few debates about the morality of Dov’s murderous plan. But these do not plumb any great philosophical depths and are quickly dispatched, so the heavy-breathing exchanges about who really loves whom can continue.

On Off Broadway F+
(Matt Windman) Unfortunately, Goldfarb's spends so much time dissecting the emotional love triangle among the characters that he turns what could have been an exciting, philosophic thriller into a dragging, overly complicated soap opera. The flow of the action is also interrupted by a flashback at the top of Act Two and his very awkward use of language. Director Leigh Silverman made matters worse by staging the play so slowly and using too many pauses. As a result, the production lacks the necessary momentum to carry the plot forward convincingly. Her very young cast displays a fiery amount of passion and raw sexuality, but their performances remain more melodramatic than truly convincing.

New York Post F-
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Levieva, in particular, is downright unbelievable as the cunning, headstrong Anika. (She's much better in contemporary roles, as those who caught her in "Adventureland" can attest.) Granted, Anika is saddled with wince-inducing lines. "The world continues to disappoint me, Jascha," she moans. "The world continues to be unfair." This twaddle would defeat Meryl Streep, and Levieva, sounding like a petulant emo kid with posters of Theodor Herzl in her bedroom, doesn't stand a chance.

The Daily News F-
(Joe Dziemianowicz) In the press notes, the play is called "a romantic thriller." But between a B-movie script by Daniel Goldfarb ("Modern Orthodox"), tone-deaf direction by Leigh Silverman and uniformly overheated performances, it has all the tension and believability of Broadway's spy spoof "The 39 Steps." That comparison isn't made just willy-nilly. The shows echo each other in a variety of ways - the espionage plots, a scheming femme fatale, a scene on a speeding train, spooky music (Tom Kitt handles the chore here), right down to a secret agent with missing fingers.

Talkin' Broadway B+ 11; CurtainUp B+ 11; TheaterMania B- 9; TONY C- 6; Lighting & Sound America C- 6; Village Voice D+ 5; The New Yorker D 4; Variety D 4; AP D- 3; The New York Times D- 3; On Off Broadway F+ 2; New York Post F- 0; The Daily News F- 0; TOTAL: 64/13 = 4.92 (D+)

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Our House

GRADE: C-

By Theresa Rebeck. Directed by Michael Mayer. Playwrights Horizons. (CLOSED)

Theresa Rebeck's Our House alternates between scenes at a television network and a house in St. Louis where roommates squabble about television and rent. The critical consensus is that while entertaining, it doesn't provide any new insights. Critics frequently refer to past films and television shows that had greater success at satirizing these topics, including Network and 30 Rock). Still, critics appreciate the sleek production, especially the set by Derek McLane and costumes by Susan Hilferty. They are mixed on the direction, with more than one critic complaining that Mayer directs everyone to scream.

American Theater Web A
(Andy Propst) Director Michael Mayer gives the piece a beautifully calibrated staging and has elicited a host of delectable performances from the ensemble. Alongside Welch's frighteningly flamboyant portrayal of Wes, Baccarin turns in a marvelously intelligent turn as the not always terribly bright (her mispronunciation of "Shiite" is a running joke), but certainly shrewd, burgeoning news diva. Kunken's imbues Stu with a weak-willed earnestness that makes the character almost pitiable and Strong, employing a nasal, sing-songiness, turns in captivatingly edgy performance as the TV-addicted Merv.

Associated Press A-
(Michael Kuchwara) Director Michael Mayer, aided by Derek McLane's mobile, split-stage settings, has done an excellent job separating the worlds of big-time television higher-ups and a shabby living room where the hostage drama takes place. The pace of the show is unrelenting. But then so is Rebeck's fast, often furious dialogue, whether she is aiming for a laugh or something more serious. That voice of reason — or at least some semblance of morality — is provided by Stephen Kunken. He portrays a broadcast assistant with a conscience. It's a lonely job in this dark, disturbing and surprisingly effective comedy.

CurtainUp B
(Elyse Sommer) Rebeck uses a well known behind-the-tube relationship between a network executive and a reporter/reality show hostess to jump start her focus on the reality show craze that has exacerbated TV's continued downward spiral. Being a writer savvy enough to thrive in the fiercely competitive world of television and also nurture her voice as a theater playwright, she has managed to make it all slickly entertaining. Her characters are so broadly drawn that we can laugh even though TV's dumbing down effect on the populace (from the big chiefs on down) is no laughing matter. Playwrights Horizon has supported her work with a nifty production, stylishly helmed by Michael Mayer... The shifts between the two environments are interspersed with snippets of Jennifer's broadcasts, each one in a new and more show-biz-y outfit (a round of applause to costumer Susan Hilferty). When the Network and St. Louis stories finally and inevitably do collide, its explosive and even more in a super-heightened mode of exaggeration as everything that has gone before. Ultimately, Our House, like the medium it satirizes ends up offering up chuckles rather than any stunning new insights.

Bloomberg News B-
(John Simon) At her second-best, which this is, Rebeck can still be amusing. I love a line like Wes’s “I’d like to feed Anderson Cooper to the Israelis, they’d know what to do with him.” But much of the play is merely bricolage. Unquestionably good are Derek McLane’s acerbic set design and Susan Hilferty’s extravagant outfits for Jennifer. Michael Mayer has directed effectively, and there are telling performances from Stephen Kunken (a beleaguered Stu), Jeremy Strong (an odious Merv) and toothsome Morena Baccarin (a Brazilian-born spitfire) as Jennifer. Christopher Evan Welch is one of our best comic actors, and his Wes is a wonderfully larger-than-life, monstrously funny, sinister clown.

Newsday B-
(Linda Winer) Director Michael Mayer ("Spring Awakening") finds the craven glee in what the network mogul (a deliriously shifty Christopher Evan Welch) calls "synchronicity." World views flip easily between scenes with his scarily erotic/robotic anchor star (the creepily perfect Morena Baccarin) and scenes at a dowdy, middle-America house rented by four singles.

Time Out New York B-
(Adam Feldman) Michael Mayer’s production at Playwrights Horizons strikes me as the best possible version of Rebeck’s vaguely Foucauldian fantasy. Derek McClane’s bipartite set perfectly renders the play’s two overlapping worlds: the ice-gray slickness of SBS and the brown-toned hominess of a St. Louis house shared by four mismatched roommates. (They are not on a reality show themselves, but might as well be; their main conflict involves which of the group should be kicked out.) Principal in this group is the sociopathic, television-obsessed Merv, played with extraordinary loser charisma by Jeremy Strong, in an indelible performance. You only wish that Rebeck had given everyone more substance to work with.

New York Post C+
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) But Rebeck and director Michael Mayer don't pack enough punch to help us overlook the material's familiarity. When Jennifer finally meets Merv, their showdown lands way beyond the outer reaches of believability. Worse, it feels flat. Tension and humor balance best in the less message-laden scenes among the roommates. When one of them, Alice, blows a gasket during a house meeting, Katie Kreisler hits her comic marks in a brilliant display of wounded self-righteousness and helpless rage. Rebeck may not have trusted this foolishness to carry the whole show, but here it makes for much more drama than TV's contrived shenanigans.

The Village Voice C+
(Michael Feingold) As in the crowded coziness of the St. Louis house, the goings-on in Wes's palatial but barren office (it has only one chair—his) raise questions of believability that displace the ethical ones Rebeck wants to raise. With Wes and Jennifer's affair being the talk of the chat sites, you wonder why neither Wes's wife nor his board of directors interferes, why other network brass accept the situation so passively, why neither Wes nor Jennifer ever has a moment's qualm. The characters' sociopathy starts to look like the playwright's convenience. This last point ultimately undoes Rebeck. When violence, flaring up in the St. Louis house, finally lets her bring her two stories together, the results are all too pat, as if occurring in a comic-strip world where nothing's complicated and nothing matters very much... Even half-truths can shine, fortunately, when inhabited by performers with inner fire of the kind director Michael Mayer seems to have a knack for igniting in young actors. Welch and Kunken, artistic chameleons who are always reliable and always surprising, work subtle wonders here; Siegfried builds a full portrait from very few hints. Best of all are Strong and Kreisler: Mapping their contrasting manias like master geographers, they display between them enough bravura to steal this and a dozen other shows as well.

Lighting & Sound America C
(David Barbour) Equally well-cast is Morena Baccarin, as Jennifer, here rendered as an immaculately dressed and coiffed vacuum. (Thanks to Susan Hilferty's wickedly canny costumes, she really has the look; you could slip her into a CNN broadcast this very minute, without anyone being the wiser.) The director, Michael Mayer, has fun with a sequence in which Jennifer appears in increasingly fluffier outfits as her broadcasts shift from bombings in Iraq to pet tips and cocktail concepts. As Wes notes, "Staying informed in America is optional." The premise of Our House was apparently inspired by the hiring of Julie Chen -- once a CBS Morning News anchor and the second wife of network head Les Moonves -- to be the host of Big Brother. At the same time, there's nothing here that you can't find in, say, Paddy Chayevsky's screenplay for Network; in these days of 500 cable channels, Facebook, and Netflix, the idea of Americans living in mass slavery to the networks is pretty quaint. Rebeck seems not to have noticed the proliferation of 24-hour cable news channels on which issues are talked to death by news personalities engaged in rigid ideological battles. And what with Survivor now in its 18th season and Gail Collins weighing in on Jon and Kate Plus Eight on the Times Op-Ed page, reality programming is hardly the freshest target. Rebeck even paraphrases that quintessential dead white male, H. L Mencken, having Jennifer remark, "No one's getting poor underestimating the intelligence of the American audience.'"

Theatermania C-
(Sandy MacDonald) How the two worlds merge is best left unsaid in the interest of surprise. However, the insertion of an intermission hints at the rift between acts one and two, and the challenge that Rebeck has set herself in trying to bridge farce and tragedy isn't fully met. As the play continues, Wes continues on his trajectory of heedless megalomania, with news division head Stu (a wry, Dick Cavett-like Stephen Kunken) attempting in vain to make him hear reason. Their arguments over the sacred -- and indeed, FCC-mandated -- duty of keeping the public informed are the juiciest and funniest segment of the play. However, despite the uniformly superb work of the cast (which includes Mandy Siegried and Haynes Thigpen), the characters can feel cartoonish. And the crisis that comes to take center stage feels sensationalist -- which, of course, is how Wes chooses to play it. The audience, however, may succumb to a sense of Law & Order déjà vu (and vu and vu), ultimately undercutting the drama's impact.

Talkin' Broadway D+
(Matthew Murray) It doesn’t matter much that Mayer’s production is slick, sexy, and fast-moving, refocusing seamlessly across Derek McLane’s bifurcated set to probe both the network’s New York home and that of Merv and his buddies in St. Louis. Nor does it matter that the acting, with the exceptions of the performers playing Merv’s roommates (who tend to oversell their very brief moments at the center of the action), is largely enticing: Baccarin is a vivacious presence, and kicks up some sexual and comic heat with Welch; Strong is a fine fit for his unmotivated slob; and Stephen Kunken suavely rounds out the cast as the cunningly hapless news division president Wes is too happy to steamroll. What does matter is that Our House, despite its clarity and intelligence, is of and about a time that’s past, though it behaves as if it’s set in the present. When Big Brother and Survivor were just igniting the reality TV craze, when movies about live-video ubiquity like The Truman Show and EdTV seemed slightly more fantasy than documentary, and when more people cared who said what and when on the news, this all might have seemed like an important breaking story.

The New York Times D-
(Charles Isherwood) Granted, it is not easy to parody the circus of self-display and self-humiliation that so much of the bottom-feeder fare on television has become. But Ms. Rebeck’s barbs often feel blunt, and the bifurcated plot, switching between Wes’s world and Merv’s, makes it hard for the director, Michael Mayer, to generate much comic energy. Ditzy, ambitious female newscasters are hardly new targets (Jennifer mispronounces “Shiite” and has a hissy fit over the selection of sweaters she is offered); Nicole Kidman played a similar stunner on the make with a microphone in Gus Van Sant’s “To Die For” more than a decade ago. No more novel are soulless Hollywood executives who scream expletives, slam phones and toss around pink slips as if they were confetti. Wes is a more bilious, less funny version of the preening egoist played by Alec Baldwin on the brilliant “30 Rock.”

Variety D-
(David Rooney) There's a central shock element here that causes the two storylines to collide, but it's a surprise chiefly because the playwright has failed to credibly seed the development anyplace in character or plot. Elsewhere, audiences will be a step or two ahead of the predictable action, particularly the cynical machinations of Wes, who remains a one-note Gordon Gekko of television, regardless of any twitchy idiosyncrasies Welch attempts to bring to the role. (Are we really still making the same old jokes about the suits' loathing of writers?) Other key characters are similarly shallow and more inconsistent: Merv's transition from ranting slacker to deranged media savant ("Night is falling on our planet," he decrees) is as unconvincing as Jennifer's sudden opportunistic smarts when she takes control of an explosive situation... The playwright can do better, as can Playwrights Horizons. Plays like "Our House," and recent presentations from Craig Lucas, Sarah Ruhl and Nicky Silver, suggest the Off Broadway nonprofit should channel its support for contemporary American dramatists into shepherding new talent, not producing second-rate work from established scribes.

Backstage F+
(David Sheward) The setup is an obvious lampoon of the relationship of CBS president and CEO Les Moonves and his wife, CBS News reporter Julie Chen, whose status as a serious journalist was called into question when she started hosting the reality show Big Brother—a situation Rebeck uses to examine the blurring line between TV news and entertainment. A worthy topic and a fair-enough starting point, but Rebeck soon loses her way, going so far over the top that the play resembles an overlong comedy sketch rather than a seriously funny critique of modern American culture. Paddy Chayefsky handled the same theme with much greater dexterity in the film Network more than 30 years ago. We are now living in the funhouse world envisioned by Chayefsky, whose mad-prophet newsman told us all to get as mad as hell (Glenn Beck, anyone?), and Rebeck's comic takeoff comes across as silly slapstick.

Wall Street Journal F+
(Terry Teachout) What follows is a minor miracle of mediocrity, a play in which no one says or does anything unpredictable. Ms. Rebeck has spent much of her career working as a TV writer and producer, and it appears that she learned her lessons too well.

The New Yorker F
(Unsigned) Sadly, Rebeck, who owes more than just her prolificacy to the years she spent writing for TV crime dramas, can’t quite bring herself to bite the hand that’s fed her, loading the play—like a “Law & Order” episode—with so many eleventh-hour plot and tone reversals that she almost gets away with not having fresh insight into such well-trod satirical territory. Ironically, the whole thing—with its nakedly formulaic plotting and cast of talking heads—plays like a slapdash telefilm, but, unfortunately for the audience, they can’t change the channel.

The Bergen Record F-
(Robert Feldberg) The world doesn’t need a warmed-over satire about TV that’s not only very old news — the play trips over its own whiskers — but has been eclipsed by the medium’s clueless self-satire. Rebeck is shocked — shocked! — at what’s happened to the television industry. Did you realize TV executives will do almost anything to get high ratings? And, in that pursuit, they’ve blurred the line between entertainment and news?... If you’re unable to comprehend why all this matters, Rebeck has a character explain it, with heavy verbal underlining. Is anything more irritating than being instructed in the obvious?

The Daily News F-
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Shrill, outdated and often illogical, the Playwrights Horizons production at times made me want to shout, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” One such moment came during a particularly credibility-stretching interview by a reporter hellbent on exploiting a crime to boost her career.
The play has two main plots. Each is filled with characters drawn with tracing paper and Magic Markers — no fine-line details to be found here... Direction by the usually solid Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening,” “Everyday Rapture”) seems to be simply: Talk really loud. The whole cast does.

American Theater Web A 13; AP A- 12; CurtainUp B 10; Bloomberg News B- 9; Newsday B- 9; TONY B- 9; New York Post C+ 8; The Village Voice C+ 8; Lighting & Sound America C 7; Theatermania C- 6; Talkin' Broadway D+ 5; The New York Times D- 3; Variety D- 3; Backstage F+ 2; Wall Street Journal F+ 2; The New Yorker F 1; The Bergen Record F- 0; The Daily News F- 0; TOTAL: 107/18 = 5.94 (C-)

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Inked Baby

GRADE: C

By Christina Anderson. Directed by Kate Whoriskey. Peter Jay Sharp Theater. (CLOSED)

Much is made of a scene in Inked Baby involving a character speaking to a pretzel. The Daily News's Joe Dziemianowicz and The Times's Charles Isherwood were completely taken in by this scene, while The Post's Elisabeth Vincentelli refers to it as a "jumping the shark" moment. Though the play has a polarizing effect on critics, most agree that playwright Christina Anderson has a knack for writing real characters and dialogue, but her potential is not fully realized and her play suffers from the sci-fi subplot.

The Daily News A
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Chances are you’ve never had a heart-to-heart with a pretzel. But in the twisty new drama “Inked Baby,” an expectant father who’s adrift does exactly that when he pours his guts out to a salty snack food he calls Petey. Here’s the weird thing: The scene doesn’t seem so odd, even when little Petey talks back. Credit talented newcomer Christina Anderson, who’s making her Off-Broadway debut at Playwrights Horizons. She’s a writer who’s unafraid to take risks and whose work defies easy categorization because of that. This 90-minute one-act blends topical drama with a spooky subplot about environmental contamination that takes the story into “Twilight Zone” territory.

Village Voice A-
(Garrett Eisler) Anderson's oblique indictment of "environmental racism" does not make her characters any less tangible or touching, especially when so sharply drawn by the accomplished cast under Kate Whoriskey's mostly fluid direction. The pace sometimes lags and the quiet tone rarely varies, yet underneath the unremarkable surface lies a sophisticated and haunting political allegory.

Variety B+
(Marilyn Stasio) Andromache Chalfant's austere set of rigidly boxed-off rooms tells us exactly where we are in this bleak emotional landscape -- a divided domestic setting where everyone lives in his or her own private little world, safely isolated from everyone else's suffering. If it weren't for Jason Lyons' neon tube lights signaling periodic shifts in the atmosphere, the whole play might be taking place in the womb that Lena (Angela Lewis) has generously agreed to loan out to her older sister, Gloria (LaChanze)... Anderson, a 2007 Susan Smith Blackburn Award nominee, writes with a keen sense of the shared intimacy -- and unspoken rivalry -- in sister relationships. And for all the awkwardness of their roles in this difficult life drama, there is never anything forced about the way Lena and Gloria communicate as siblings... The dual stylistic strains are more unsettling when they force these finely drawn people to do something out of character. While it's understandable there would be some household tensions during the long months of Lena's confinement, Gloria's early and abrupt mood shift from eager mother-to-be to cranky complainant comes out of left field. And while that plot turn leads to some provocative scenes in which LaChanze (a Tony winner for "The Color Purple") can strut her stuff as a sexually awakened adulteress, Gloria's initial discontent is unconvincingly motivated.

Talkin' Broadway B
(Matthew Murray) The title of Christina Anderson’s new play, Inked Baby, which just opened at the Playwrights Horizons Peter Jay Sharp Theater, is appropriate in more ways than one. It’s packed with characters so sharply drawn they may as well have sprung fully formed from Anderson’s mind and pen. The infant of the title is marked before its birth for reasons it will never understand and the adults in its life will never be able to justify. And amid the delicately drawn and carefully blended lines that define this look at surviving an uncertain world, a few smudges mar an otherwise distinct achievement. But it’s tempting to want to look past them given what Anderson gets right. Her language seamlessly blends shiny-urban crispness with dark-alley vernacular... Director Kate Whoriskey has provided a stark, pungently paced staging that highlights every terror Anderson has devised, and Jason Lyons’s lights hauntingly lay out the physical and emotional playing spaces on which these people spar. Inked Baby surges with adrenaline, but it would have been considerably more effective had Anderson simply let them fight and unleash their pent-up needs and long-ignored desires in an ring of unforgiving realism. Once they become star hoppers, traipsing across the cosmic significances of their love and their land, they stop demanding you pay attention to them.

Offoffonline B-
(Doug Strassler) Baby then becomes about something very different from what it initially suggests. Rather than debating the bioethical issues of what happens when a surrogate mother is a close relative, the show tackles the issue of environmental racism. The low-income area where these characters have lived may literally be hazardous to their health. Anderson’s play is undeniably steeped in the current state of the African-American experience. The playwright pays literal homage to Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun both in her dialogue and, presumably, in the naming of Lena’s character. This is heavy stuff, doled out in quite a palatable manner, but while Baby transfers its subject matter, it never quite reaches any transcendent level. Instead of cresting, the problems of the individual characters in the play give way to the politics of their creator. Anderson is to be applauded for her ambition, but in switching from a realistic predicament to one less so, she loosens the grip she has on her audience.

American Theater Web C
(Andy Propst) Christina Anderson's Inked Baby, which opened at Playwrights Horizons last night, starts of as a delicately and warmly crafted exploration of the complicated emotions that surround surrogate pregnancies. At about the halfway point of this play, which does introduce a playwright of great promise, its focal point changes, and it becomes a play about the health ramifications of environmental pollution. While the corporate dumping has a direct impact on the former aspect of the play – Gloria (LaChanze) may have been unable to become pregnant because of the unhealthy conditions that have surrounded her all of her life – there's a strange disconnect between the two aspects of the play, which though intriguing never fully satisfies.

Nytheatre.com C-
(Loren Noveck) The never-really-explained illness seems to be connected to length of residence in that particular neighborhood; Lena has been away long enough to be somewhat protected. There's an underlying thematic element about what it means to be tied to a place, connected geographically to people, that's intriguing but not fully explored. And this medical plot never really comes to life—its menace seems genuine to the characters, but the storytelling is simultaneously too abstract or stylized (with its big paper tags and scary needles and purposely oblique, euphemistic terminology and non-linear symptoms) and too sociologically literal (traced to very specific environmental contamination from a years-old industrial waste site in a very matter-of-fact, politically charged way that feels out of sync with the rest of this side of the play).

Back Stage C-
(Leonard Jacobs) How do playwrights know their story can stand on its own — that additional plot strands aren't needed to round out the experience? Watching Christina Anderson's ambitious, imaginative Inked Baby, one suspects that neither director Kate Whoriskey nor some insightful dramaturge ever assured the playwright that her basic tale was enough to move an audience. Lacking such assurance, Inked Baby has a surfeit of themes, variations, and metaphors. The production is beautifully acted, and Anderson's ear for dialogue crackles through unflinchingly real characters, but the final effect is a muddle... Had Anderson hewed to her core notion of a wife having misgivings over her sister's surrogate pregnancy — and the efforts of Dr. Marion (Michael Genet) to moderate the emotions rising in everyone as the due date draws near — she would have concentrated Inked Baby's power, especially as Whoriskey succeeds at keeping certain scenes simmering. And while the Odlum story line resolves oddly, it adds a measure of sweetness to the play's bitter undertone, thanks to LaChanze's delicate portrayal of a woman emotionally gutted by her physical limitations. But Anderson's virus idea — and disconcerting images like the medical assistant literally wresting teeth from people's mouths — tips the scales.

CurtainUp C-
(Elyse Sommer) Here's where that heaped high plate starts to overflow and the playwright's efforts to give free reign to an increasingly complex situation and yet keep each character's actions and reactions believable stumbles into shaky territory. The environmental problem that has gone beyond making the water in Gloria and Greer's neighborhood undrinkable turns the familial tensions into a surreal nightmare in which Greer and Ky, both employeees in local businesses, are tested for a strange virus, with procedures that smack of George Orwell's 1984. And if this weren't enough, there's a subtext about Gloria's relationship with Odlum (Che Avende), the owner of a tattoo shop. It's from a tattoo of a butterfuly perched on a history book that Gloria has Odlum ink on her wrist that the play gets its its title —— a sort of reverse surrogate act of marking the baby with good luck, that ends up having yet another, darker meaning. The scene when Gloria and Greer's baby is conceived is choreographed with a wonderful stylized delicacy. On the other hand, the environmental problems are too stylistically over the top. Even without the extremes used to deal with the pollution caused illness, unwinding so many plot threads in just ninety minutes ultimately gives Inked Baby a feeling of being overstuffed yet too short on details to be thoroughly nourishing.

Theatermania D+
(Dan Balcazo) There's a compelling story buried somewhere in Christina Anderson's promising, yet frustrating new play, Inked Baby, now making its world premiere at Playwrights Horizons. There may even be two compelling stories within this 85-minute work. Unfortunately, the playwright's insistence on combining two stylistically different narratives has yielded choppy, unsatisfying results, with neither storyline benefiting from being linked to the other.

The New Yorker D
(unsigned) Whatever larger plight this is supposed to represent—the institutional neglect of African-American communities, perhaps—is left uncertain in Christina Anderson’s workmanlike script, which manages to make both infidelity and urban plague seem humdrum.

The New York Times D-
(Charles Isherwood) One of the livelier exchanges in this odd and frustrating play is an intimate colloquy between a man and a pretzel stick... The director, Kate Whoriskey, whose fine production of Lynn Nottage’s “Ruined” is on view at Manhattan Theater Club, seems flummoxed by the play’s disjointed structure. The pace feels leaden, the bursts of ominous music spurious, and the performers never gain much traction. LaChanze, a naturally vibrant presence, warms up a bit in her scenes with Mr. Ayende, but this romantic subplot is as thinly developed as the other elements in the play. Ms. Salter, the co-star and co-author of “In the Continuum,” adds some spark before Ky’s diagnosis. But because the play is constructed of so many short scenes, it is difficult for any of the actors to work up much rapport. Except perhaps for Mr. Gupton and his pretzel. They establish an easy rhythm, but then savory snacks are known to be accommodating co-stars.

New York Post F
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) It's not so much that Christina Anderson's off-Broadway debut defies logic poetic license goes a long way at the theater, where sensibility can easily trump sense. But the play so waffles between lyrical realism and heavy-handed allegory that it ends up in a wishy-washy gray zone. Anderson ambitiously tries to braid together two big issues surrogate motherhood and ecological disaster. As if this weren't enough, each theme is burdened with its own set of complications... Granted, staging this text was a tall order, but neither director Kate Whoriskey ("Ruined") nor her uneven cast have found a way in. Whoriskey, for instance, choreographs Greer and Lena's lovemaking like a Cirque du Soleil number set to smooth jazz, while even a pro like LaChanze can't get a firm handle on her slippery character.

Lighting & Sound America F
(David Barbour) Inked Baby is something of a science experiment itself, in which the playwright, Christina Anderson, has tried to crossbreed a dysfunctional family drama with an environmental/political thriller. The result is an ungainly, two-headed creature, suffering from the twin afflictions of stilted dialogue and implausible plotting. The characters are flat and unpleasant -- never the best combination -- and the decision to use Lena to carry the child is so obviously a mistake from the get-go that there's no chance of any dramatic progression. The "virus" plot -- it is eventually revealed to be a bad case of environmental contamination targeting a black neighborhood -- is introduced in the weirdest possible fashion, with a medical assistant inexplicably swooping down on the characters and grabbing tissue samples from them, as if they were guinea pigs. Several of them are revealed to be suffering from an illness manifesting itself in a dermatological condition in which pieces of their skin crumble into granules of dirt. A demonstration of this sent ripples of unwanted laughter through the audience at the performance I attended.

The Daily News A 13; Village Voice A- 12; Variety B+ 11; Talkin' Broadway B 10; Offoffonline B- 9; American Theater Web C 7; Nytheatre.com C- 6; Back Stage C- 6; CurtainUp C- 6; Theatermania D+ 5; The New Yorker D 4; The New York Times D- 3; New York Post F 1; Lighting & Sound America F 1; TOTAL: 94/14 = 6.71 (C)

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The Savannah Disputation

GRADE: B

By Evan Smith. Directed by Walter Bobbie. At Playwrights Horizons. (CLOSED)

It's not often that a play gets regularly compared to a sitcom while remaining well-regarded by reviewers, but Evan Smith's comedic religious debate The Savannah Disputation somehow manages to do it. This is one of those weird cases where reviewers who disliked the play (Patrick Lee and Marilyn Stasio) and those who enjoyed it agree on what the play is but disagree in their responses to it. Everyone loves the performances, particularly stage legend Dana Ivey. The big outlier is Linda Winer's dismissive take in Newsday. Off-Off Online says "For Christians of any denomination, The Savannah Disputation serves as a smart parable about the necessity of examining one’s faith," leaving this unbelieving writer to wonder "what does the play have to offer the 22% of Americans who aren't Christian?"

NYTheatre A
(Martin Denton) Delightful, smart ... Ivey's performance borders on tour-de-force, which should not surprise her fans one bit. Burke actually anchors the piece, adding depth to her trademark ditz characterization; we really do understand that Margaret has been put in peril by Melissa's un-asked-for intrusion into her spiritual life. Birney is terrific as Father Murphy, in a very human and richly layered performance. Overbey more than holds her own as the troubled yet unwaveringly dogged Melissa. Walter Bobbie is at the helm, and he's given his actors full reign to make the most of Smith's creations. Likewise, he's brought together a design team that delivers what feels like a near-perfect world for this play.

Lighting and Sound America A
(David Barbour) Evan Smith is an unusually crafty playwright: In a miraculous act of transformation, he blends learned theological discussions with a priceless supply of zingers, spinning out a religious farce that says plenty about the cultural dislocations of this so-called Christian nation of ours.


NY Daily News A-
(Joe Dziemianowicz) The new comedy at Playwrights Horizons did something all too rare nowadays; it made me laugh my head off and think at the same time... If the play stumbles, it’s because the author hasn’t come up with a satisfying conclusion. But this production is constant-ly entertaining as staged by Walter Bobbie (“Chicago”), who has assembled a sterling cast. Birney shows the pastor as a man of quiet reason and, when ambushed, fiery anger. Overbey’s carefully gauged work makes her character human and persuasive, not hateful and stupid — even if Melissa calls yoga “satanic.” Burke brings touching vulnerability to the meek Margaret. And as the wholly meanspirited Mary, Ivey’s wrysoaked performance is divinely inspired.

Backstage A-
(Gwen Orel) Curmudgeons are entertaining. Curmudgeons who are elderly Southern women rant as smoothly as cold sweet tea. And when they rant about religion, they are funny as all get-out. Dana Ivey, playing Southern curmudgeon Mary in The Savannah Disputation, Evan Smith's pitch-perfect new play at Playwrights Horizons, is the answer to an atheist's prayers.

American Theater Web A-
(Andy Propst) Thoughtful and frequently hilarious ... It's a merry ninety minutes that's terrifically orchestrated by director Walter Bobbie. Smith's zingers – which can make the show sometimes sound like a sitcom – fly from the performers with pitch-perfect timing. Concurrently, as the play ebbs and flows from comedy to theological debate and human drama, it proves both thought-provoking and moving[.]

Off-Off Online B+
(Edward Karam) Does all this sound heavy and depressing? It isn’t. Smith has invested it with plenty of comedy, and director Walter Bobbie has cast two supremely accomplished actresses to play the sisters

NY Post B+
(Elisabeth Vincentelli) Considering The Savannah Disputation deals with religion in a Southern setting, director Walter Bobbie ("Chicago") successfully avoids cheap effects - no pronounced accents played for superior Yankee smirks here. But, as with all comedies, everything hinges on the cast. Fortunately, this quartet is positively heavenly. Birney, probably relieved at being in a light-minded production after the harrowing "Bug" and "Blasted," is a straight man with a spine, and Overbey manages to make her spiritual salesgirl a lot less ditzy - and obnoxious - than she could have been.

Hartford Courant B
(Malcolm Johnson) The Savannah Disputation takes its religious stands seriously, but it is often humorous. It takes a familiar subject — the efforts of Pentecostal to win converts — and puts a comic spin on the encounters. The production draws its strengths from the quartet of performances. But the engine driving the play is Ivey, who long ago excelled at Playwrights Horizons as an older Georgian in "Driving Miss Daisy." But it's Ivey and Burke who run off with the show.

Time Out NY B
(Helen Shaw) Smith blends two great traditions: the snappish Southern woman giving everybody what for and a faith-versus-faith showdown with dueling quotations from the good book. Since the former is Ivey and the latter is delivered in part by the great Reed Birney, playing a priest Mary sics on Melissa, the play delivers a great deal of pleasure. But though director Walter Bobbie keeps dialogue like, “Are you saved?” “I guess I’ll find out!” whizzing along, the piece still sags. Issues of doubt, celibacy and mortality whirl about the talented foursome, and yet we frequently feel the playwright trying to keep them talking.

AP B
Nobody plays ''cranky'' better than Dana Ivey. And Marylouise Burke can turn ''dither'' into an art form. Together, these actresses offer compelling arguments for your attendance at The Savannah Disputation, Evan Smith's mild comedy about the theological clash between two Catholic ladies of a certain age and an eager young evangelical on the proselytizing trail.

NYTimes B
(Charles Isherwood) A lot of The Savannah Disputation, which is directed with plenty of fizz by Walter Bobbie, consists of comparative-religion-class debates over the word of the Bible and the tenets of the Catholic faith, set to the rat-a-tat rhythm of a sitcom laugh track. It sometimes feels like a Very Special Theological Episode of “The Golden Girls,” with the adorably daffy Ms. Burke cast in the Betty White role, and Ms. Ivey as a stand-in for Bea Arthur. Fortunately, Ms. Burke and Ms. Ivey are actresses of integrity and ingenuity, infusing these sometimes cartoonish characters with doubt and conflicted feeling. Ms. Burke is hilarious in her embarrassment when Mary goes on the attack; she flees the room with the alacrity of a frightened hare.

CurtainUp B
(Elyse Sommer) As Smith takes no sides it's never too clear just what his intentions are, other than to see if he could write a quiet tragi-comedy that derives its action, poignancy and laughs from a parlor pow wow about issues of faith. It's a yes he can, and, given the variety of Smith's work overall, I look forward to what he comes up with next.

TalkinBroadway B-
(Matthew Murray) It’s as if Smith has no end of things he wants to say about these very divisive topics, but is afraid to go full-bore for fear of overshooting or alienating his audience. But the common-sense construction and thoughtful arguing of The Savannah Disputation seem strong enough to withstand any direct blows of acrimony. Like most of its characters, it knows what it is and what it wants to say, but is still searching for the most appropriate voice to translate its often heavenly words into the most easily assimilable form down here on Earth.

Variety C
(Marilyn Stasio) [The play] feels like a young relative's valentine to beloved elderly aunts. But the scribe underestimates the intelligence of the old girls, winningly played by Dana Ivey and Marylouise Burke in Walter Bobbie's sleek production for Playwrights Horizons. While Smith doesn't shy away from touchy religious topics, he cuts off the soul-searching just when it begins to get challenging, delivering believe-it-or-else marching orders and covering up his retreat with vapid character backstories.

TheaterMania C-
(Patrick Lee) The characters In Evan Smith's The Savannah Disputation, now at Playwrights Horizons, eventually challenge each other's deeply held faiths, but the results aren't more than sitcom-deep... While the play's set-up may breeze by under Walter Bobbie's direction, it slows to a crawl once the sisters invite both their parish priest Father Murphy (Reed Birney) and the missionary to dinner and a faith-based showdown gets underway.

Newsday F+
(Linda Winer) The cast is the only reason to see The Savannah Disputation, Evan Smith's tedious liturgical-lesson comedy about religious bickering among biddies and true-believers in a Louisiana town.

NYTH A 13; LSA A 13; NYDN A- 12; ATW A- 12; OOO B+ 11; NYP B+ 11; HC B 10; AP B 10; NYT B 10; CU B 10; TONY B 10; TB B- 9; V C 7; TM C- 6; ND F+ 2. TOTAL = 146 / 15 = 9.73 (B)

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Prayer for My Enemy

GRADE: B-

By Craig Lucas. Dir. Bartlett Sher. Playwrights Horizons. (CLOSED)

Don't be fooled by the middling grade; Craig Lucas' new American family drama, which takes on homophobia, alcoholism, road rage, and the Veitnam and Iraq wars, receives not lukewarm mixed reviews but a jostling crowd of opinionated, and widely differing, responses that end up averaging out in an uneasy middle. That may be only fitting: Champions think the play's complexity and polyphony speaks poignantly to the most pressing issues of the day; detractors less charitably see the interior monologues Lucas gives his characters as rambling, unconnected, and undramatic. Most praise the straight-play performances by two musical theater stars, Victoria Clark and Jonathan Groff, but critics are divided on whether director Bart Sher did brilliant, understated work or just checked out.

Nytheatre.com A+
(Stan Richardson) What fascinates me most about Craig Lucas is that he has no gimmick, no tricks up his sleeve—he's not even aspiring to be one step ahead of his audience. In fact, he remains resolutely a few steps behind, examining what we—preoccupied with our own velocity—have overlooked, taken for granted, or dismissed...Go see Prayer For My Enemy because you will at times bark with laughter, at times be stunned to silence, and all the while find yourself hanging on every eerily familiar word uttered by these vivid characters, more captured than written.

Talkin' Broadway A
(Matthew Murray) Prayer for My Enemy is one of those plays that should only be examined whole - dissecting the individual pieces will only encourage your drowning in its stream of consciousness...What had started off scattered, almost confused, turns profound and reminds us that the formation and dissolution of relationships and friendships, births, deaths, and everything in between, all mark a moment in history that will never come again...The cast and Sher all understand what Lucas has made implicit: everything is important, because everything makes a contribution - in both life and theatre. It’s to the considerable credit of everyone involved in Prayer for My Enemy that it’s impossible to distinguish between the two.

Newsday A-
(Linda Winer) Few playwrights pull us down life's rabbit holes with the dark yet altogether engaging force of Craig Lucas...In "Prayer for My Enemy," the multilayered, deeply unsettling and beautifully conceived new work at Playwrights Horizons, the small-town serenity barely covers the separate abysses where all six characters are in their own free falls...Bartlett Sher...gets his quiet powerhouse of a cast to juggle cosmic questions with the casual absurdities of family life...Only the final few moments, a hymn, feel undeserved.

American Theatre Web A-
(Andy Propst) Lucas' various plots may sound like a lot for a 90-minute drama, but while "Enemy" may feel overstuffed, in director Bartlett Sher's taut staging that some of New York's finest actors, the play is never anything less than a captivating stew of ideas and emotions...On many levels, "Enemy" feels as if it might want to be expanded. The shorthand in which it has been penned seems too terse for such a rich mix of emotions and ideas.

Time Out NY B+
(David Cote) Prayer for My Enemy unfolds like a loose, Thornton Wilder–esque meditation on family and social ethics, with the Iraq War looming large in the form of gay soldier Billy (Jonathan Groff, making a solid nonmusical debut). Billy’s upstate New York clan is a Whitman’s Sampler of middle-class dysfunction...In between domestic scenes, Victoria Clark simmers brilliantly on the sidelines as Dolores, a high-strung New Yorker taking care of her dying mother, and whose life intersects fatally with the family. Bartlett Sher’s elegant production guides us sensitively through these lives of quiet desperation—well, mostly quiet.

CurtainUp B+
(Elyse Sommer) Clark brings sizzle to a play that at times is closer to a simmer...Mr. Lucas, like the two wars that have nurtured so many American tragedies, has not tied up his play like a cheery, neatly wrapped gift box. Life according to Lucas, whether in the city or suburbs, is too messy to be wrapped in tissue paper and neatly tied up with a ribbon.

Theatermania B+
(Dan Balcazo) Craig Lucas' thoughtful and engaging new play...may not satisfy all audiences. But for those who give themselves over to the style and message of the script, it contains plenty of rewards...The ensemble cast does a fine job under Sher's crisp direction...However, it is Clark's exquisite performance that leaves the most lasting impression -- and contributes greatly to the effectiveness of Lucas' drama.

New Yorker B+
(John Lahr) A game of hide-and-seek, in which the command of Lucas’s writing works as a kind of unspoken promise to the audience: in this series of opaque, impressionistic moments in one family’s turmoil, something will be found...He is trying to dramatize our psychic static, the perpetual, noodling back-and-forth between the conscious and the unconscious mind...If I got to choose, I’d want Victoria Clark on my team. At once delicate, alert, decent, and impish, she is an astute player, who makes an instant connection with the audience.

Hartford Courant B
(Malcolm Johnson) Set against a dark, romantic frieze of trees in the atmospheric set by John McDermott, who has also worked with Lucas and Sher at Intiman, "Prayer" unfolds as a strange tale of a love that dare not speak its name, even in the 21st century...The versatile Groff...gives "Prayer" a strong center which holds the play together and balances against the family scenes and Clark's ramblings as Dolores, who inherits a small fortune when her mother dies.

Village Voice B-
(Michael Feingold) Prayer for My Enemy often turns, like his best plays, enthralling, passionate, and articulate. But it also often feels contradictory and unclarified as it jumps almost nervously from topic to topic. What drives the evening, more than anything said or done onstage, seems to be Lucas's struggle to find the connections that give life meaning. That his methods visibly aren't working only makes the effort more grippingly painful. While hopelessly inchoate, the play also at times seems only a breath away from being a masterpiece.

Backstage B-
(David Sheward) With this loony bunch, Lucas is too obviously creating a microcosm of America. See how screwed up this country is, he metaphorically screams at us. Fortunately, Lucas has shuffled a joker in the pack--a character who is just as crazy as the family but in a different, subtler way. This is Dolores, played with a manic comic intensity by the heartbreaking Victoria Clark...I didn't quite buy the whole premise; the setup and playing out seemed too forced and theatrical. But director Bartlett Sher and his exemplary ensemble maintain a remarkably specific degree of verisimilitude.

The New York Times C+
(Ben Brantley) Provocative, confused and confusing...Scholars of this questing playwright’s work will find in it a significant and intriguing shift of tone. Average theatergoers, on the other hand, are unlikely to share the play’s spirit of forgiveness. For while “Prayer for My Enemy” dares to ask smart and hard questions about a homegrown violence that reaches from suburban backyards into the battlefields of Iraq, it often suffers from the same muddle-headedness that plagues its uneasy and uncertain characters. And though the production features several stirring and eloquent performances...it is ultimately too disconnected to move us as it means to...“Prayer for My Enemy” has more food for thought than a dozen average new American plays. The problem is that this production never assembles that food into anything approaching a digestible meal.

New York Post C+
(Frank Scheck) To say a play is too ambitious seems churlish, but "Prayer for My Enemy" fairly begs the criticism. This drama of family dysfunction deals with so many themes (principally the need for forgiveness) that it feels more overstuffed than revelatory. Add to that more interior monologues than have been seen onstage since Eugene O'Neill's "Strange Interlude," and you have one daunting evening...Under Sher's sensitive direction, the talented cast delivers flawless performances, and the play is obviously deeply felt. But "Prayer for My Enemy" is as messy as the lives of the characters it depicts.

New York C+
(Dan Kois) Alternates moments of high excitement with stretches of tedium...Lucas has his characters speak their innermost thoughts directly to the audience in the middle of scenes. It doesn’t quite work from a theatrical perspective – it’s confusing and saps the play of all subtext by making it plain old text – but at least it’s fun for his capable cast...Might best be remembered as the show with which relative newcomer Cassie Beck launched her career sky-high. Tart, sarcastic, and winsome all at once, her performance as Austin’s pregnant daughter Marianne is a marvel.

Variety C
(David Rooney) This attention-deficit therapy session is all jangled, raw nerves, never pausing long enough on any subject to settle on a lucid theme or establish a discernible point of view. Despite Bartlett Sher's customarily classy staging and a topnotch cast, most audiences will find themselves as unmoored as the characters...The most problematic aspect is the intrusive inner-voice elements, which either create confusion (is he/she saying that to the other characters or to us?) or spell out far too much...It may be the playwright's intention that the issues raised here are all but impossible to resolve, but it makes this a frustrating "Prayer" without an amen.

The Daily News C-
(Joe Dziemianowicz) Lucas constructs it so characters spend half the time passionately speaking their minds and spilling their guts to the audience, while keeping the chat polite and meaningless for friends and family. It's an interesting enough conceit, though at times you want to passionately yell at the stage - "Pick an idea and develop it!" Bartlett Sher...has shown he's a director with vision, but here his staging isn't compelling or clear. The cast is committed and works hard to make the most of their roles, some sketchier and more clichéd (like the Manhattan-phobic Dolores) than others. There's no doubt all six actors have better performances just down the road.

AM New York C-
(Matt Windman) About halfway through Craig Lucas’ new drama “Prayer for My Enemy" at Playwrights Horizons, we suddenly made the following quick prayer: “Please end this tortuous show as soon as humanly possible.” Unfortunately for us, the 100-minute intermission-less play continued to its full conclusion...Besides the sadness of every single character, there is not much of a plot. More often than not, you get the feeling that the playwright is rambling without focus...Still, we much give credit to Bartlett Sher for staging a handsome, nuanced production in spite of the play’s problems.

The Record D
(Robert Feldberg) Lucas is interested in big issues, but it’s hard to figure out what points he’s trying to make...Lucas puts on the table such topics as war, alcoholism, sexual identity confusion, the trauma of having an impaired child and all-around family dysfunction. But nothing sticks. I’ve rarely seen a play in which so much happens—offstage mostly—to such little effect...The sensation is of watching a play in a foreign language that you only somewhat understand. You get a general sense of what’s going on, but the essential details are missing.

Wall Street Journal D
(Terry Teachout) A mess, a mishmash of mawkish clichés that tries frantically to sound profound...Bartlett Sher's staging is cute and pretentious, just like the play.

Bloomberg News D-
(John Simon) The actors try to suggest the shift from dialogue to interior monologue (frequently within one speech) primarily through facial expression and body language. This doesn’t work at all and left me totally confused. Not that it mattered much, since I was equally unimpressed by the thoughts and the utterances...Why something that so manifestly cries out for Lucas’s drawer should be foisted on us for 100 intermissionless minutes, I can hardly explain.

Nytheatre.com A+ 14; Talkin' Broadway A 13; Newsday A- 12; American Theatre Web A- 12; Time Out NY B+ 11; CurtainUp B+ 11; New Yorker B+ 11; Theatermania B+ 11; Hartford Courant B 10; Backstage B- 9; VV B- 9;The New York Times C+ 8; New York Post C+ 8; New York C+ 8; Variety C 7; The Daily News C- 6; AM New York C- 6; The Record D 4; WSJ D 4; Bloomberg D- 3; TOTAL: 177/20=8.85 (B-)

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