"Because it has been created by Ms. Kennedy, this landscape is as ugly as it is beautiful...Only Tennessee Williams, an early influence, summons a cultural past with such a plangent mix of rhapsody and disgust...Directed with haunting lyricism by Evan Yionoulis...Occupying a mere 45 minutes...it nonetheless seems to stretch and bend through generations of conflict...The physical production may be the most ravishing and organic that a Kennedy dreamscape has ever been given."
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"Starts on a murky note but resonates powerfully in Yionoulis's artful production...The effect is disorienting at first. But once past the puzzlements of the opening scene, the story moves forward with impressive concision and impact."
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"This fragmentary new one-act is so brief and intangible...Feels fascinating but unfinished...Yionoulis does first-rate work with her two young actors: they show a commitment to nuanced, sincere character work...But it's not quite enough to anchor us...A play full of ache and anger, but its exploration of the monstrous national heritage that has helped to bring us to our present moment is so fleeting and fractured that it often feels unmoored."
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"Smaller than her previous plays but is shaped like the shimmering and original scripts that made Kennedy’s name...The new work is too short and thin to thrive on its own, especially for audiences who haven’t seen Kennedy’s work before. How marvellous it would be to experience Kennedy’s new work alongside another version of her parents in love and at war, spinning together and separately as their daughter tries to be if not a divided self then entirely herself."
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"This brief, poetic effort must have great personal resonance for its 86-year-old playwright, but it's the sort of willfully obscure drama that should be accompanied by a syllabus...Yionoulis certainly stages the opaque, dreamlike proceedings gorgeously...Pecinka and Canfield give affecting performances...But even running a mere 45 minutes...the fragmented work is for the most part tedious and uninvolving...Designed more to be studied than appreciated in performance."
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"The play offers no straightforward answers...Still, under the direction of Evan Yionoulis, the obliquity isn't off-putting - it's entrancing...The acting is fittingly hypnotic...Kennedy understands how language can be used. She and Yionoulis take different idioms - those of the South, Elizabethan drama, and 1940s films - and use them to tell a mystery story that speaks to various times and places...Let's hope this story proves intelligible to audiences."
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"It is dreamlike, yet disturbing; simultaneously memorable and evanescent; a wisp of a text with unsettling, revelatory undercurrents. It is, in equal parts, stunning and unsatisfying, and anyone interested in this writer's career will not want to miss it...At times, the staging could do more to clarify the text, which remains stubbornly elusive, even confusing at times...Kennedy remains one of the American theatre's true originals and nobody else has explored this dramatic terrain so boldly."
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"As poetic, mysterious, and intricately structured as one might expect from Kennedy's past work...Made up of narrative fragments...The bits and pieces, which seem unrelated at first, blend into narrative that inspires awe and pity...Yionoulis imbues the playwright's harrowing material with tenderness while keeping the action on the move throughout. Despite the rambling, reflective nature of Kennedy's monologues, Yionoulis's production is a swift, emotionally intense 50 minutes."
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