The Lady WIth All the Answers

GRADE: B



By David Rambo. Directed by B.J. Jones. At Cherry Lane Theater through November 29th

Imagine if you will a bizarro world where plays have elaborately constructed previews before movies. Now imagine the smokey bass voice-over intoning the words "Judith. Ivey. IS. Ann. Landers." You now know pretty much all you need to know about The Woman With All The Answers, the new one-woman bioplay at the Cherry Lane that's getting a fairly predictable crop of positive, unenthusiastic notices. Ivey gets high marks, while the reviews for the script can be summarized by the following quote from Matthew Murray: " The play itself may be pure pabulum, but it’s hard to resist the homey notion of a stranger who cares about others so much she just has to solve all their life issues."

Backstage A-
(Erik Haagensen) [Ivey] mines Rambo's script for every ounce of subtext and can change the emotional temperature on stage instantly, whether with a glance, a shrug, or a vocal modulation...Ivey creates a warm camaraderie with us while always remaining firmly, effortlessly in character...Where Rambo falters is in exposing Eppie's emotional core. Admittedly, he's hamstrung by the fact that she is a deeply private person who would never share her dirty laundry with the world. Indeed, she tells us so herself. But the play should at least suggest why the crisis has occurred in Eppie's life, and it never does. Fortunately, Ivey's performance is so human and specific that she almost compensates.

Variety B+
(Marilyn Stasio) This diverting showpiece has more on its mind than nostalgia for yesteryear, capturing the genial proto-Oprah at a crucible moment when her career as a professional know-it-all becomes unexpectedly imperiled by the meltdown of her own 35-year marriage.

NYTimes B
(Charles Isherwood) Mr. Rambo’s writing is breezy and fluid, although you can often hear the punch lines coming a few beats off. Fleetly directed by B J Jones, the play is a genial primer on a genial subject, but not much more. We never really learn the details of the juicy drama at its heart — how and with whom did Eppie’s husband fall in love? The Lady With All the Answers is sweet, frothy and insubstantial, like the Fresca that is Eppie’s beverage of choice.

TheaterMania B
(Adam R. Perlman) Rambo practically canonizes his subject, a Midwestern woman who spent half a century speaking out on issues previously only whispered-about in public, from sexual bondage to abortion to homosexuality to how to properly hang toilet paper. Fortunately, star Judith Ivey -- sporting Lederer's trademark bouffant hairdo and perfectly imitating her Midwestern Jewish speech pattern -- brings a groundedness to her portrayal of Lederer that blunts the script's self-aggrandizing storytelling...The Lady With All the Answers may not be accomplished theater; indeed, some viewers might find the whole enterprise overly cloying and cutesy. But it nevertheless both charms and informs its intended audience, much the way Ann Landers did in her day.

CurtainUp B
(Deirdre Donovan) This solo play premiered in 2008 at the Pasadena Playhouse (with Mimi Kennedy) and is now at the Cherry Lane Theater with two-time Tony award-winning actor Judith Ivey as Landers. Ivey channels the legendary journalist with chutzpah and razor-sharp intelligence. Not only does the Texan-born actor affect a convincing Midwestern accent but with her bouffant hair style (courtesy of Paul Huntley and comfortably chic outfits (by Martin Pakledinaz). she looks something like the actual Ann Landers Above all Ivey captures Landers' sharp wit and eagle-eye for seeing life from a broader perspective. But she is also endearingly "one of us" and just a bit vulnerable.

TalkinBroadway B
(Matthew Murray)Ivey, who first took on Landers last year in a production at Chicago’s Northlight Theatre Company, provides as much as it seems anyone could. Her comfortably squeaky voice, her quirky way of screwing up her nose in deference to a particularly choice comic nugget that doesn’t dislodge a strand of her bouffant hairdo, her rigid presentation of bone-deep aunt-next-door concern for well-being in all its forms. She even makes somber centerpieces of Landers’s contrived conflictions over her own disjointed state. That can’t be easy, given the lighthearted, genial nature of the rest of the play, which really feels like it just wants to be a cozy comedy for couples who’ve been married long enough to remember when Landers, like newspapers, truly meant something.

Lighting and Sound America B
(David Barbour) The script is nothing but a series of delaying tactics -- how many times can she not write the column -- and Rambo struggles to keep things going even for only 90 minutes, including intermission. Ivey is more than willing to massage her lines into something like a drama, but a vehicle is supposed to support the star, not the other way around. But oh, the hell with it: Ivey is irresistible, whether she's teasing the audience with a handful of letters about sex ("You really want to hear some of these, don't you," she smirks), modeling her floor-length fur, recalling how she took it upon herself to explain the details of oral sex on a local talk show, and showing a little steel in her smile as he deals with Jules on a long-distance call. From start to finish, she's the kind of funny, frank, foursquare dame you'd love to tell your troubles to.

NY Post B-
(Frank Scheck) How does the woman who's dispensed common-sense wisdom about everything under the sun fare when her husband of 30 years leaves her for a younger woman? It's a poignant hook on which to hang the evening, but ultimately it's insufficient to make this slight effort directed by B.J. Jones more than a mildly entertaining diversion, despite Judith Ivey's charming performance as the plain-spoken oracle.


BS A- 12; V B+ 11; TB B 10; NYT B 10; CU B 10; LSA B 10; TM B 10; NYP B- 9; TOTAL=82/8 = 10.28 (B)

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Dov and Ali

GRADE: C+

By Anna Ziegler. Directed by Katherine Kovner. Playwrights Realm at the Cherry Lane Studio Theatre. (CLOSED).

Faint praise greets Anna Ziegler's drama about an Orthodox Jewish high school teacher and his strict Muslim student; even critics who consider the play a worthy effort lament its paucity of surprises or complications. Most critics think the cast brings the show some needed pulse and nuance, and most don't quibble too much with the playwright's good intentions. And though most writers don't use the contentious subject matter to score any political points, Nytheatre's David Ian Lee sees fit to cite Hitchens on religion, while Theatermania's David Finkle refers offhandedly to "the Muslim sense of women's inferiority."

CurtainUp B+
(Elyse Sommer) Though Dov and Ali fits the genre of discussion play, this is no wordy Shavian treatise but a tightly constructed play, albeit one that never quite rises to its loftier ambitions and on more than one occasion asks the audience to suspend questioning the characters' actions too closely. Still Ziegler has imbued the discussion with warmth and impressive dramatic flair, especially in her use of Ali's sister Sameh (Anitha Gandhi) as both narrator and active participant. Miss Ziegler is blessed in having her script given a simple yet handsomely realized production by a director (Katherine Kovner) with a solid grip on the mood and flow of the story, and four actors sensitive to the nuances of the individual and group dynamics...Likely to have an active life in regional theaters.

The New York Times B
(Ken Jaworowski) In some ways Dov and Ali could be called a flawless play: the characters speak in precise sentences, their arguments are soundly constructed, their entrances and exits are impeccably timed. Indeed, the work, by Anna Ziegler, is so well assembled that you soon long for it to get messy, to have a character be more than just a figure who spouts partisan viewpoints or who doesn’t always have the perfect line right at hand...Mr. Green and Mr. Ambudkar do commendable jobs of creating nuance, given the script’s demands: even in the midst of passionate arguments their characters’ phrasings are grammatically impressive and their thoughts clearly articulated...There is no real mystery as to the path the story will follow: disagreement, conflict, then, ultimately, mutual understanding. Still, the play, being staged at the Cherry Lane Studio Theater, is never less than watchable. In a time of ceaseless snark and cynicism, its earnestness in asking bigger questions can be downright refreshing. Just because a lesson is being supplied doesn’t mean it’s not worth learning.

Nytheatre.com B
(David Ian Lee) When Dov and Ali stays in the classroom, sharp ideas are offered via cool words exchanged between intriguing characters predisposed to dramatic conflict. Yet the narrative landscape of Dov and Ali ranges far and wide...Dov and Ali boasts an attractive, appealing cast, and includes some very strong performances...Dov and Ali is occasionally hindered by blocking and staging conventions that seem visibly at odds with the impulses and intuitive behavior of the ensemble...Still, Dov and Ali is not a bad evening of theatre. Anna Ziegler's beguiling script crackles with nuance and wit, referring directly and indirectly to politics, current events, and literature.

Theatermania B
(David Finkle) Effective if less-than-psychologically complex play...Towards the play's close, Ziegler has Ali say to Dov, "I just don't think, Mr. Gold -- with all due respect -- that life is about pleasing our fathers." It's a remark that pretty much puts the play's message in a nutshell, which isn't the sort of thing that counts as the mark of a subtle playwright at work...Green, Ambudkar, Gandhi, and Armbruster enhance the work's strengths and minimize its obvious weaknesses.

Backstage C
(A.R. Perlman) There are no surprises. The plot proceeds not by logic but by convenience, with characters knowing whatever's required to advance the dialogue while remaining ignorant of whatever might impede it. The four actors give the performances asked of them. Adam Green is the unsure teacher, Utkarsh Ambudkar the too-sure student, Heidi Armbruster the shiksa, Anitha Gandhi the Muslim woman who dares to think. These are, of course, ideas, not characters, but the actors poke a few nice grace notes through the thick surface. Something similar happens in the writing. In the toss-away moments, where the dialogue is lived-in rather than hurled to make a point, Ziegler is smartly observational. Perhaps she had to write this play, but I look forward to seeing future, less important works.

New York Post C-
(Frank Scheck) This depiction of the ways in which the two characters' ingrained religious beliefs affect their lives doesn't exactly burst with surprises, but its heart is certainly in the right place...This is the sort of play in which the characters reveal their attitudes in bluntly expository fashion, engaging less in dialogue than stilted debate. Its issues are all on the surface and, while the playwright has crafted them with care, she's left little for the audience to think about. By the time it reaches its all-too-predictable conclusion, the evening has taken on the feel of a sociology class homework assignment.

Lighting & Sound America C-
(David Barbour) The playwright, Anna Ziegler, is mostly interested in drawing parallels between Dov and Ali, each of whom is hostage to his religious tradition. It's an interesting idea, even if it requires more sophisticated treatment than it gets here. But she miscalculates badly by making Dov a tongue-tied milquetoast; it makes for terribly lopsided debates. Also, as in Geoffrey Naufft's recent and overpraised Next Fall, the characters' religious beliefs are presented as black-or-white, all-or-nothing propositions, devoid of nuance or sophistication and pitted against each other in a zero-sum game of war...Katherine Kovner's staging is well-paced, but I wished for a little more stillness onstage; the actors tend to fidget and shuffle about a bit too much...Ziegler has taken on what may be the great subject matter of our time. But you can't probe stereotypes and expect to get much of anything. Unfortunately, Dov and Ali trivializes more than it illuminates.

Variety D
(Sam Thielman) Watching Dov and Ali is a little like talking politics with a person who raises the subject but is too timid to have opinions. Playwright Anna Ziegler seems to believe it would be rude to come to any conclusions about Jewish/Muslim relations, the fundamentalist elements in either culture, or anyone's religious convictions...Ziegler's tightly structured play has clearly been cut and polished down to its essence, which is only a virtue if you're not already being glib...Katherine Kovner's adequate direction gets all the points across, but it doesn't add any nuance to the play...The problem with cultural clashes between the West and the Islamic world has surprisingly little to do with anyone's inability to express himself, and the suggestion that religion simply stifles the better angels of our nature is a condescending one.

CU B+ 11; NYT B 10; Nytheatre B 10; TM B 10; BS C 7; NYP C- 6; LS&A C- 6; V D 4; TOTAL: 64/8=8 (C+)

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The Unseen

GRADE: C+

By Craig Wright. Directed by Lisa Denman. Cherry Lane Theatre. (CLOSED)

Craig Wright's The Unseen, about two men imprisoned and tortured for unknown reasons, is compared unfavorably by critics to works by Kafka and Beckett. Most critics find the play largely ineffective for the lack of context and violence described in gruesome detail, but never shown. The one dissenter, Time Out's Adam Feldman, writes, "If the writing is good enough, violence needn't be seen to be believed." The reviews are kindest to the actors--Steven Pounders, Stan Denman, and especially Thomas Ward as their torturer.
Edit: Additional positive reviews pushed the grade from a C to a C+.

Nytheatre.com A+
(Josh Sherman) The Unseen, for any self-respecting theater snob, demands to be anything but. A riveting example of deceptive simplicity, The Unseen, fueled by the dazzling wordplay of playwright Craig Wright, turns solitary confinement into a potboiler thriller that not only sucks you in, but puts a choke hold on you until it has your undivided attention. With masterful direction by Lisa Denman and terrific, spellbinding performances from a first-rate cast, the Cherry Lane Theater might just have on its hands a sellout for as long as it wants one. The Unseen is a darkly comic, deeply thought-provoking, emotionally disturbing, and soul-searching masterpiece that will resonate with you for far longer than the blissfully quick 65-minute run time.

offoffonline A
(Edward Karam) The Unseen is bleak but not depressing, and it feels especially timely and universal in Lisa Denman's taut, riveting production. The men might be in Abu Ghraib, or Guantánamo, or any number of hellholes around the world... Although the physical action is limited, Wright’s dialogue takes up the slack with unexpected lyricism, from the story of a button that Valdez’s mother has taught him, to Smash’s gruesome descriptions of what he has done to a prisoner. And his ending suggests, hopefully, that somehow humanity can never be extinguished, that an unseen spark survives even in the most inhumane circumstances. The play may be short, but it packs a wallop.

Time Out New York A-
(Adam Feldman) In any other medium but the stage, this piece—which mostly consists of wearily desperate conversation between two men in adjacent prison cells—would hardly be possible at all. It's almost all talk, but with enough Wright angles to keep you listening. The main characters are stock, but well flavored by director Lisa Denman's strong cast of actors unknown in New York.

CurtainUp B+
(Jenny Sandman) Kafka's The Castle, for instance, worked largely because there were no particularities—the lack of specificity, both made the tale more maddening and more universal because any regime/government/bureaucracy could be seen to fit. The same holds true for other existential works, like Beckett's Waiting for Godot. The Unseen has that same maddening lack of specificity. We don't know any more about the prisoners' crimes or fates than they know. But director Lisa Denman has chosen to highlight the few details that exist in the prison—the seemingly random buzzers, the tin plates and spoons, the lighting, the pattern of stonework, the bloody work that precedes Smash's inarticulate rage. The actors, too, channel their search for detail into Wright's precise language; trapped as the characters are, the actors aren't able to explore any range of motion, other than Wallace's fiddling with random scrounged objects and Valdez's aimless wandering. This makes the play less a commentary on political prisoners and the corruption of power than a simple story of two men who have largely given up. It's a fine story, to be sure, but this production lacks the broader context the script hints at.

The New York Times C-
(Anita Gates) Both Mr. Pounders and Mr. Denman give strong performances, but the gruesome show-stopping speech is delivered by Thomas Ward as a mysterious character named Smash. In it he describes feeling so sorry for a prisoner who was in pain that he decided to put him out of his misery, quite literally. Even fans of Quentin Tarantino’s exuberantly violent films may feel a bit squeamish. The denouement, however, is thin. The tension falls apart at the end. Maybe the anticlimax is the point, but it leaves “The Unseen,” directed by Lisa Denman (who is married to Mr. Denman), feeling like a fragment of a short story that should only be read in full. And a little bit like a limp handshake.

That Sounds Cool C-
(Aaron Riccio) These are some fine moral issues, but they are played too much for laughs. This clashes with the aesthetics, for Sarah Brown's set is cold and unyielding, Travis Watson's lighting is direct, and Dustin Chaffin's sound design is a simple buzzer that never ceases to be jarring. The lines have the glibness of Dirty Sexy Money and the meandering banter of Lost (both of which Wright has written for), but none of the depth. As a result, when Smash takes center stage and tells his prisoners that he's been shit on--literally--for being too "human," it's hard to feel where Ward's coming from. For all the gory descriptions, the fact that it's all unseen makes The Unseen play out like a G-rated Saw: moralizing without consequences. All this makes Lisa Denman's direction somewhat heroic, as if she's tried to salvage a comedy from an abbreviated political play. Unfortunately, if there's a punchline, that too goes unseen, and without one, it's just artifice. Now we know why Beckett always threw in a banana or two: he wanted his characters to at least have the potential of slipping on the peel.

Lighting & Sound America D+
(David Barbour) Wright is apparently conceived in the tradition of Harold Pinter's Mountain Language or Caryl Churchill's Far Away, works in which totalitarian brutality is presented bluntly and without any social or political context. The trouble with such an approach is that, once you remove the specifics, what's left seems artificial and more than a little arbitrary... Pounders and Denman do everything they can to make their characters interesting, as does Thomas Ward as Smash, but The Unseen sentences us all to an hour's confinement in a theatre filled with fancy metaphors and structureless action. (Smash has a monologue in which he recalls killing a prisoner, but is notably lacking in impact.) Lisa Denman's staging can't resolves these issues, but she does keep the pace up, which is much appreciated. Sarah Brown's multi-level collage of prison cells is visually interesting, although the walls seem too obviously painted. Travis Watson's lighting and Carol Booker's costumes are both perfectly okay. Dustin Chaffin's sound design mixes those aggravating buzzers with between-scenes interludes of morose piano music.

The Village Voice F-
(Alexis Soloski) The subject matter is overfamiliar, and the writing is overwrought. Wallace worries that news of the outside world might "fill the heart with unsatisfiable hunger for the peach that can never be reached." Smash delivers a gruesome monologue on the subject of eye, tongue, and vocal cord extraction. (Apparently, eyes are quite squishy.) Wright exploits gruesomely vivid imagery and figurative language, though rarely to much effect. Sometimes he turns to allegory, as when Wallace reflects on his own experience as a means to understand the universal human condition: "All that's plain as day," he says, "is that we're brought here against our will, and we're continually tortured and starved." That's a dreary view of the life—and Wright has written a dreary play to announce it.

Nytheatre.com A+ 14; offoffonline A 13; TONY A- 12; CurtainUp B+ 11; The New York Times C- 6; That Sounds Cool C- 6; Lighting & Sound America D+ 5; The Village Voice F- 0; TOTAL: 67/8 = 8.375 (C+)

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Telephone

GRADE: B



By Ariana Reines, based on “The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech” by Avital Ronell. Directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. The Cherry Lane Theater. Through Feb. 28.

Poet and text-collagist Ariana Reines tries her hand at playwriting and while reviewers think the results are a mixed bag they are for the most part taken with the show, a triptych of pieces related to the history, mystery and communicative dilemmas posed by the telephone. Ken Rus Schmoll gets high marks for his directing and the designers (particularly sound designer Matt Hubbs) are singled- or is it signaled?- out for praise. The one major dissent is NYPress' Leonard Jacobs, who found the show arbitrary, overlong and semi-pointless.

The New Yorker A
(Unsigned) The poet Ariana Reines’s feverishly imagined, word-drunk play, inspired by Avital Ronell’s history “The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech,” considers the transmogrifying effects of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention—its displacement of the body, its coaxing toward silence. Staged rivetingly by Ken Rus Schmoll, the piece unfolds in three parts

Theatermania A
(Sandy MacDonald) Ariana Reines' tripartite play Telephone -- inspired by Avital Ronell's 1991 study The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech -- perfectly fulfills the Foundry Theatre's mandate to create "works that merge the exploration of social and political questions with unusual theatrical forms." Such a grandiose goal might sound like an invitation to over-intellectualized bloviation, but in the hands of this gifted playwright, a fleet director such as Ken Rus Schmoll, and a superlative cast, Telephone comes through clearly as a quirky dramatic delight.

Just Shows To Go You B+
(Patrick Lee) Produced with painstaking care. Every sonic and visual detail seems deeply considered and correct, working the play - which is an experience rather than a narrative - immediately into the subconscious.

Village Voice B+
(Tom Sellar) Ken Rus Schmoll's incisive direction—and first-rate cast—creates a powerful sense of urgency for all these would-be communicators. With three broad strokes, Telephone shows us how, regardless of the medium, our urge to speak, to "transmit" ourselves, remains strong—even when no one's really listening to each other.

Variety B+
(Sam Thielman) Reines advances the cause of adventurous theater by asking listeners to pay attention and then rewarding them for doing so, occasionally in gratifyingly silly ways. The play is frequently oblique, but not infuriatingly so. Its sense of the absurd ranges from existential terror to Stan-and-Ollie give and take (kudos to Dellapina and Frazier there, too); it wants to converse, rather than instruct. With Telephone, Reines has vaulted into a distinctly uncrowded category that hosts next-generational thinkers like Will Eno, and it's a pleasure to have her there.

The New York Times B+
(Ben Brantley) Telephone, the inspired and utterly original new tone poem of a play at the Cherry Lane Theater, probes such feelings with the sensitivity and detachment of a heart surgeon. A production of the Foundry Theater, which has quietly been responsible for some of the most artistically ambitious stage work seen in New York in recent years, this short and haunting piece considers the relationship between the telephone and madness and, by extension (as it were), the limits of human communication... darned if the Foundry hasn’t again translated a heady, unruly and uncompromisingly bookish book into vividly theatrical terms. Under the direction of Ken Rus Schmoll, a cast of three and a sharp-eyed design team turn what might have come across as gobbledygook into a stylish and stimulating show.

Gothamist B+
(John Del Signore) Taken as a whole, the production, by the intellectually rigorous Foundry Theater, is a complex, challenging exploration of technology's power, enriched by an enthralling, ambient sound design by Matt Hubbs and Sunder Ganglani. While restoring a sense of mystery to what's become a commonplace object, Telephone also illustrates how confused, banal and incomplete our struggle to be understood has always been. The last exchange we hear in the half-darkness occurs between two loved ones who have found each other again—sort of. A woman can hear her man's voice through the phone, but when she asks him where he is, he just repeats, "I'm here," which is both true and false.

Time Out NY B
(Helen Shaw) First, the bad news. Ariana Reines, despite her status as an award-winning poet and dab hand at textual collage, does not glide effortlessly into the role of playwright. In fact, the more she tries to seem like a playwright, the rockier her intermittently fascinating triptych Telephone can get. Happily, though, after a staticky first chapter—in which Alexander Graham Bell (Gibson Frazier) and his sidekick Watson (Matthew Dellapina) chat their way through limbo—the piece clears up beautifully. And in a feat that downtown theatergoers have come to accept as commonplace, director Ken Rus Schmoll dials in design and dizzyingly adept actors to accelerate the total experience into something quietly captivating

Backstage B-
(Adam R. Perlman) The rule of three -- so potent in comedic arithmetic -- holds less sway over serious material. As made apparent by the Foundry Theatre's Telephone, there's no magical payoff in partitioning a work into thirds. Telephone's triptych form seems aimed at evoking a panoramic view of connection and disconnection; what it more closely resembles, however, is a garage sale. There's only a loose relation between what's presented, and though there are some real gems, you have to sort through a whole lot of junk to find them.

NYPress D
(Leonard Jacobs) Schmoll directs Frazier and Dellapina to amble around the wall but at all times seemingly arbitrarily and without motivation; it’s as if we are to be prevented from developing a concrete sense as to where we are or what may have called these dotty men back to the room where history was made. Indeed, the actors are ordered, together or separately, to vanish behind the wall entirely for brief periods, as if they’re in a constant state of suspended inanimation. A dull, throbbing dramatic entropy descends as Bell and Watson indulge in cant—or was it Kant?


TNY A 13; TM A 13; V B+ 11; VV B+ 11; NYT B+ 11; GOTH B+ 11; TONY B 10; BS B- 9; NYP D 4; TOTAL = 104/10 = 10.4 (B)

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Fault Lines

GRADE: B-

By Stephen Belber. Directed by David Schwimmer. Cherry Lane Theatre. (CLOSED)

The newest gabfest from Stephen Belber (Tape) got extra attention for being the Off-Broadway directing debut of David Schwimmer. Critics praised the cast and by and large saw through the play's twisty machinations, with some enjoying the manipulation but most finding it tiresome.

Talkin' Broadway A
(Barbara & Scott Siegel) Fault Lines, a sly and extremely satisfying new work...is not only cleverly constructed, it's also very funny. Punctuated with laughs that come out of character, rather than out of joke lines, this is a show that deserves to run and run—provided critics and audience members don't give too much away and ruin it for future playgoers.

Theatermania A-
(Sandy McDonald) For a while, one wonders if the playwright is simply planning a threesome variation on Edward Albee's The Zoo Story; but happily for the audience, he's concocted something far more intricate—a play that will have spectators literally gasping as surprise succeeds surprise...Schwimmer deserves credit for keeping the pace naturalistic—imbued with subtle tonal shifts—yet crackling.

Curtain Up A-
(Simon Saltzman) What could be more fun than being totally unprepared for a shocking revelation, or simply being out-smarted by a playwright who can cause that kind of response?...Under the taut direction of David Schwimmer, Belber's riveting play defies expectations at every turn...Schimmer has picked four exceptional actors as well as picked a darn good play.

AP B+
(Michael Kuchwara) Belber has a knack for making male banter sound real even while his plot veers into improbability while attempting to keep the audience off-balance...The actors, under David Schwimmer's easygoing, unobtrusive direction, know how to get laughs and Belber supplies them with surprising regularity.

Daily News B
(Joe Dziemianowicz) While briskly entertaining and well-acted, the 80-minute work doesn't push any boundaries—unless you count frank talk about ejaculation. What the play does is tickle a timeworn device: the mysterious stranger who changes everything.

New York Times B-
(Jason Zinoman) Stephen Belber's enjoyable if flawed Fault Lines is part of a genre—call it Dude Plays—about vaguely homoerotic male friendship in which the towel-slapping banter usually hides much deeper divides...Mr. Belber sets up his themes skillfully, and his punchy, jocular dialogue displays a sensitive ear for language. Relying on a constant series of probing questions, the play, however, can get monotonous, almost like a courtroom drama.

Variety B-
(Sam Thielman) Belber seems less interested in his characters than in what hoops they can jump through, so there's a basic lack of depth to these people that only a very good cast and a strong directorial hand can amend. Thankfully, this production has both. Director David Schwimmer gets a lot of warmth from [Josh] Lucas and [Dominic] Fumusa, and even [Noah] Emmerich seems well-meaning in an ursine kind of way.

NY Post C+
(Frank Scheck) Fault Lines, like many an alcohol-fueled evening, is a lot of fun before it turns increasingly uncomfortable. The discomfort stems, in part, from the playwright's propensity for gimmicky plot twists. That's too bad, because Fault Lines is good at showing how the bonds of friendship can become tattered over time.

amNew York C
(Matt Windman) The first half of Stephen Belber's 80-minute play feels pretty pointless...If not much else, Schwimmer has encouraged his actors to intense their energy levels and comic timing at all costs [Interesting new verb there, Matt.-ED]...So while the play admittedly does pick up steam and become an amusing, if predictable, exercise in surprise and moral debate, it offers nothing that you haven't seen before.

Time Out NY C
(Helen Shaw) Belber's brute adherence to a predictable structure is total Playwriting 101. He works out the "How do I keep the characters onstage?" question with schoolboy diligence, and by the time he's got Emmerich saying, "I came in thinking one thing, but now..." you wonder if he just hadn't gotten to the chapter on subtext. Luckily, the performances do give the characters startling life.

Newsday C-
(Linda Winer) Schwimmer...stages the four-character serious comedy with a good, taut sense of ordinary-guy idiosyncrasy...Unfortunately, most of Stephen Belber's 85-minute play feels too much like early David Mamet. If that weren't dispiriting enough, the play ends with a surprise twist straight out of...Neil LaBute.

Village Voice C-
(Alexis Soloski) Fault Lines...would be easier to dismiss were Belber untalented. He writes plenty of amusing lines and betrays some insight into the intimacies, rivalries, and elisions that compose male friendship...He eventually forsakes character and relationships for a series of increasingly inane plot twists.

Talkin' Broadway A 13; Theatermania A- 12; Curtain Up A- 12; AP B+ 11; Daily News B 10; New York Times B- 9; Variety B- 9; NY Post C+ 8; amNew York C 7; Time Out NY C 7; Newsday C- 6; Village Voice C- 6; TOTAL: 110 / 12 = 9.1 (B-)

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