"...Exavier uses this play to emphasize the importance of belonging to a place, and how painful it is to consign your memories of that place to the grave when its essence disappears."
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" 'Bernarda’s Daughters' doesn’t provide tidy resolutions for the women’s stories. We’re left instead watching them await the return of their mother as they speak their world into existence. Words, at least, remain theirs."
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“Exavier has no interest in bringing her rangy, complicated narrative to any kind of resolution; the play's conclusion is a fringe of dangling threads. Interestingly, the script is dotted with footnotes alluding to James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and the poet Trumbull Stickney, among others; it's the tell that reveals Bernada's Daughters as a self-conscious literary exercise rather than a gripping work of drama.”
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"The description of this rich and multilayered text may sound at best, intellectually daunting, and at worst, emotionally off putting. Yet, director Dominique Rider and an excellent ensemble give the material immediacy and dramatic urgency without diluting the dreamlike quality."
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" 'Bernarda’s Daughters' is undeniably one steamy work of art. As such, it joins a growing group of outstanding plays from current playwrights drawing attention to their cultures that they were able to draw much less frequently in the past."
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The six-member cast creates a believable ensemble though their roles are not all clearly defined. While the play reveals much about the Haitian community living in Brooklyn, as "Bernarda’s Daughters" feels almost plotless it seems to drift from one conversation to another with little or no structure. The idea of an updated Americanized version of Lorca’s very Spanish tragedy "The House of Bernarda Alba" is a good one. However, this is not as compelling or successful as Marcus Gardley’s "The House That Will Not Stand" which reset the play in 1813 New Orleans.
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Over the course of 90 intermissionless minutes, divided into five “acts” set during the summer heat, the sisters lounge around casually as Exavier’s structurally floppy play has them hopping from subject to subject on a flimsy dramatic base in which, absent their mother, the all-important element of conflict is sadly missing.
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