"Delicious new comedy directed with an assured balance of blatancy and subtlety by Daniel Sullivan...Its success is achieved not by sustained assault but by dexterity, and by always keeping the other guy (in this case, the audience) off guard...The cast members shape their characters with just enough comic exaggeration to stay credible and also to suggest that not everyone is what she or he seems."
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"Could these characters be funny, at least until the play takes an ugly, humor-killing turn at the end of Act I? Perhaps, yet most of them are not: Aside from Conlee and Moore, the actors offer comic characterizations that feel as put-on as their all-over-the-map accents. A sprinkling of cute one-liners and two live snooker sequences in the second act provide moments of relief from the forced plotting and even more forced romance, which converge in an inane finale."
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"Bean’s very silly new comedy 'The Nap' probably takes the cake for Most British Thing on Broadway...A bouncy sports caper set in the world of high-stakes snooker...The play makes its personality clear right from the get-go...Personalities are the building blocks of Bean’s comedy, and there are plenty of big ones orbiting Dylan’s steady center...For Bean, the nap is a straight line to a good joke. He knows his game."
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"Relentlessly, incapacitatingly unfunny from start to finish. The cast, Daniel Sullivan’s direction and David Rockwell’s quick-change set are all impressive, but who cares? Except during the climactic snooker match, which is full of well-staged cue-and-ball slapstick, I didn’t laugh even once. Instead, I sat silently in my aisle seat, praying for 'The Nap' to end. Don’t let that happen to you."
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"No offense to Snooker fans here, there or anywhere, but a comedy built around the game’s intricacies and milieu is bound to lose some bite when rules need more set-up than jokes...Hopes of Martin McDonagh creep back in, but are dashed entirely when a big reveal – that won’t be spoiled here – surprises us mostly by its hoariness. Until the play really lets them down, most of the cast keeps pace with the various ruses."
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"There’s something mysteriously appealing in entering the world of this pub-popular sport, here set in Sheffield, England, ground zero for snooker championships. Add high stakes, lowlifes and a wicked wit, and you’ve got a solid win...There’s in-the-moment drama as the audience follows on large overhead projections as the game is played, with tensions broken by the laughs derived from the hush-speaking commentators."
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"Effortful delivery is just one issue with the wheezy direction of Daniel Sullivan, whose forte is definitely not this kind of snappy, suspenseful comedy, in which timing is everything...It's a testimony to the cheeky humor and ingenious plotting of this 2016 play that it remains agreeable entertainment despite less-than-ideal handling. The frequently hilarious one-liners help...Sullivan's direction lacks spark and fluidity, making the play feel overlong at two hours-plus."
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"A lot of plays about sports struggle with the problem that they can’t really show you the game because they can’t control what will happen on the stage. To its credit, 'The Nap' actually contains real-time snooker...If you’re a snooker fan, it’s truly a blast...You only wish that director Daniel Sullivan’s not-so-British production had a better understanding of how close these characters actually are to the real celebrities of snooker...This American premiere also is underpaced."
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