"Critic's Pick!...Directed by Nicola Murphy on Irish Rep’s tiny second stage, Jenn Murray rides the current of the monologue like a river, navigating its rapids and eddies, and stretches of calm, with a deftness that easily brings the audience along. On a spare set by Chen-Wei Liao, abetted by Michael O’Connor’s lighting and underscored by Nathanael Brown’s subtle music and sound design, Murray slips in and out of a crowd of characters with near-total legibility."
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McBride's writing, however gorgeous, is densely constructed, a thicket of words that require time to sink in -- more time than a theatrical experience can spare. She once told The Guardian, that, upon reading James Joyce's Ulysses, she decided, "Everything I have written before is rubbish, and today is the beginning of something else." That turned out to be a Joycean stream-of-consciousness combined with a Beckettian austerity of vision. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a piece of remarkable integrity, but it is a relentless, exhausting account of a loveless life.
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Far more profound is the extent to which she embodies each person the girl mentions, giving them life-like dimensions and, thus, indisputably justifying the entire adaptation's existence. Besides her incredible skill, the core of Murray's remarkable performance (or performances) is her bravery, which the equally fearless writing requires...
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"This is one of those theatrical experiences not to be missed, where everything falls into place. And like Halley’s Comet, it is here for a brief moment and then gone with only the memory of the light and the heart-stopping encounter."
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