"It feels like the work of an untested artist...'Daddy' always seems to be annotating rather than expressing its characters’ impulses...Mr. Harris has subtitled his play 'A Melodrama.' Yet even when the participants are wet, screaming and, in the cases of its male leads, nude, the confrontations feel academic. And while Taymor keeps the play moving briskly, even the spanking sequences register as more cerebral than physical. As for the talk, it is endless and circular and repetitive. "
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"Its major frustration as a piece of writing is that, after plenty of intellectual razzle-dazzle, it wraps itself up with too neat a psychological bow. Meanwhile, the production isn’t quite committed to the text’s vast potential for either weirdness or emotional weight. 'Daddy' is full of tense and titillating material, but here it packs surprisingly little punch in the feeling department. I was never bored...but I was also never really gripped anywhere south of the brain. "
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"Alan Cumming is flawlessly creepy...Welcome to the self-love fantasy of rising playwright Harris, who has scripted a three-hour homage to his own artistry...Give the writer his due, the dialogue is, like, dope...Harris is smart and his direction is clever, but obsessive love — a writer’s own self-love, as much as a mother’s and a lover’s — is not a pretty sight, and eventually becomes a full-blown bore."
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"This lugubrious drama barely manages to work up a sweat...The play has some sly, funny moments, to be sure...But they are too few and far between, and the evening seriously goes off the rails in the third act...It's a pleasure, as always, to watch Cumming and Woodard, even when they are obviously struggling to bring emotional coherence to the scattershot material...But the cast's combined efforts are not enough to make 'Daddy' more than an exercise in affectation."
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"An over-the-top and overwritten yet smart and gripping self-described 'melodrama'...The final act is the weakest, relying on confessional monologues and finishing on an anticlimactic, unresolved note. But for the most part, 'Daddy' makes for highly compelling theater, exploring issues of race, sexual identity and contemporary art while remaining grounded in a dramatic power struggle."
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"The play packs a wallop. But 'Daddy' falters in the end by explaining too much...The performances are rich with implications, too...Director Danya Taymor effectively executes Harris's other theatrical experiments, particularly later in the play in a phantasmagoric Last Supper-like scene. It's around that scene, unfortunately, that the play goes awry...Even so, 'Daddy' is an important, must-see work for all the things that it does well."
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"Aside from its killing overlength -- it takes three acts and nearly three hours to play out --'Daddy' is overloaded with schemes and strategies that do little to add interest to its crudely rendered tug of war...Taymor's direction has its moments but the most she can do is orchestrate the script's many operatic gestures...'Daddy,' however, is all sound and fury, a series of baroque flourishes erected around a hollow core...'Daddy' wasn't ready for a first-class Off Broadway production."
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"This play, relatively realistic in its initial scenes, increasingly turns surreal...A bizarre third act, which climaxes with an immersive exorcism, mostly proves madly incoherent...Although Harris composes vivid dialogue, this flawed, overlong drama is heavily overwritten with beaux arts babble, unclear religious and psychological themes...Still, much as 'Daddy' smells of chlorine and youthful pretentiousness, its splashy production is often entertaining."
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