"An immensely powerful work that only occasionally maximizes its potential in the fitful production...Williams’ Una starts off both hopping mad and, it would seem, certifiably mad...This interpretation also begins the production at a fever pitch that can only sweat itself out...Mr. Daniels, as good as he is, is forced to emote up to Ms. Williams’ level. When the production reaches its climax, it’s anticlimactic; Daniels and Williams have already been there, done that, and so have we."
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"'Blackbird' is a comfortless 80-minute reckoning of arrested time and soiled innocence...Plot and morals are beside the point; the slow drip of memory like acid on the present is what Harrower is after...Joe Mantello reimagines his exactingly sharp 2007 staging...Time has been shattered for these walking ghosts, and we are transfixed watching them cut their hands, sifting through the shards."
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"So complicates the questions of consent and trauma and recovery—and even love—that it would be difficult to look at any of these subjects the same way again...It’s hard to think of another director besides Mantello who could so confidently package so much unprettied trauma within the big-box conventions of Broadway. He makes the experience of empathy both horrific and exhilarating...The theater at its best as in 'Blackbird' is one place where it is not only necessary but awesome to be awful."
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"Watching Williams work is like seeing a figure from a documentary perform a fictional reënactment of her own life. She shifts between the two realities—what’s true in the world and what’s true onstage—without ever losing sight of her partner...The director, Mantello has a weakness for emphasizing the issues in 'issue plays'...Fortunately for us, Williams’s performance goes beyond his rather limited purview, but Daniels’s doesn’t."
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"A pruriently manipulative tale of pedophilia...It’s a have-it-both-ways shocker that seeks to make us sympathize (but not really!) with a man who molested a 12-year-old girl, did time for it, put his life back together, and now finds himself facing the prospect of having his cover blown when the girl shows up at his office 15 years after the fact, locked and loaded. Great acting, great staging, but 'Blackbird' still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth."
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"Their rapture is murderous. They want to annihilate each other. This is the electrifying production that this season’s revival of Sam Shepard’s 'Fool For Love' aspired to be, also about a couple reuniting as they inch toward a death’s grip of horrifying power and sadness. Daniels and Williams are so devastatingly into David Harrower’s stem-winding tale of an illicit conjugation, that by the time the lights came up I felt as spent as the actors themselves appeared to be."
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"The play itself isn’t quite as successful. It takes time to settle into believable rhythms. Initial staccato bursts of words still sound stage-y. Dimming lights during monologues adds a non-realistic texture the play doesn’t need. The litter-strewn room echoing messy lives feels a bit too heavy-handed. Still, 'Blackbird' is taut, twisty and provocative. There’s value in works that make your mind fly to uncomfortable places and send out cries you can’t unhear."
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"It was Mantello’s choice to go big with the emotions in this first scene, which heightens the drama but also pitches the passion so high that the actors can only take it up… and up… to the edge of hysteria...It’s still unnerving to watch. Too unnerving, actually, because by this time, both performances, fiercely committed and complicated as they are, have gone way over the top. But even at this high decibel level, the disturbing substance of the play makes it riveting."
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