"A triangle is a sturdy shape, and it holds up well for the first half of this 75-minute play. Then Mr. Gall adds a fourth point to his geometry with the appearance of D, C’s put-upon girlfriend, and the structure loses its stability. This is too bad for a couple of reasons, the first being that Mr. Gall knows his way around a monologue and has supplied several sharply written ones. The cast is strong, too...The effect is a play that feels like a rehearsal for a grim indie movie."
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"'Wide Awake Hearts' is interesting in ideas, but not in execution. Despite its witty punch-lines and curiously 'low-key' set, the play falters in excitement. Any amount of attention the audience could have for these characters’ lives, unfortunately, dwindles into occasional. Though 'Wide Awake Hearts' makes eccentric, cool choices, like adding dark videography, to confuse the audience into what is real and what is not, by the end of the show, you don’t exactly care."
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"The Director has ensnared them all in this project apparently to keep an eye on them as they cuckold him. Or maybe it's all a sustained exercise in masochism. It's hard to tell. It's ever harder to care...'Wide Awake Hearts' ends with nothing resolved."
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"The four cast members give impeccable performances in a play that leaves us wondering whether we can believe a word any of them says...In its ambiguity, the play rests on the kind of edgy and malignant dialogue that such masters of the form as Harold Pinter and Edward Albee excelled at. The blurring of reality and performance is further augmented by lines of dialog that are repeated (multiple 'takes' for the camera) and the anxious underscoring provided by Elliot Davoren's sound design."
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"A skilled cast craftily portrays Gall's clever but wordy tale. The characters themselves are difficult to care for. Apparently Gall wants to keep them at arm's length…The pace of the production is brisk and often witty but the tale reveals little and does not move toward any end point. We never quite know if we are watching the movie or the actual life of the characters...As the worlds of illusion and reality merge, drawing apart and reuniting, fact and fiction obscure into a cloud of frenzy."
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"Under Stefan Dzeparoski’s skillful direction, this brilliant cast delivers a piercing and moving portrayal...While clever and enticing, at times all of the back-and-forth between the acting and their real-life struggles makes it exhausting and difficult to get to the core of each character. The fact that the characters also didn’t have names, adds to that murkiness, but in the end one thing is clear: 'Wide Awake Hearts' will leave you intrigued, pensive and hungry for more."
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"'Wide Awake Hearts' is one of the most cleverly written plays I’ve seen in a while, and surprisingly the writer’s focus on being clever turns out to be its one flaw...While this play would have been stronger with more scenes showcasing emotion and character development, it still is a strongly acted, stream-lined production that showcases honest moments of raw emotion laid bare by an immensely talented cast."
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"The director makes fine use of limited stage space and the actors carve out the appropriate areas...The projections and the monologues only reveal in part who these individuals are, a clever calculation by the director and playwright...However, the starkest theme in Gall’s work is that our own lives and loves are a film loop that repeats over and over again. And as in the case of these characters, it may be spinning film from which we may never awaken or extract ourselves."
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