Mankind NYC Reviews and Tickets

"The story keeps twisting even when you need it to stay put and shout. Another switcheroo arrives every few minutes, which quickly grows as tiresome and lets the satire deflate into mere sarcasm. It’s a problem of focus. Satire is about the sharpness of the darts but also of the targets. Here there are too many targets...This pinwheel of snark feels like a stunt, and there’s little that the cast can do, under the author’s distracted direction, to keep a feeling of agitated desperation at bay."
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“Even as 'Mankind' posits the radical adaptivity of male bodies, it suggests an equal adaptivity of patriarchal male rule as potentially disruptive energies are absorbed into a larger culture of surveillance, violence, control, and greed...Good material for satire, but O’Hara doesn’t seem sure how to shape it...Bravura moments are undermined by heavy-handed messaging and exposition. Like many an allegorical brainchild, the play seems like it was fun to conceive and harder to bring up right.”
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"Jason and Mark mostly alternate between bro-y detachment and screaming at each other, but in one of 'Mankind’s' strongest scenes, they start to open up about their pasts...O’Hara here succeeds in bolstering his sketch-like premise with a much needed dose of sincerity. It doesn’t last: We soon return to the world of cartoonishly drawn supporting characters, destructive male venality and idiocy, and mostly predictable digs at our messy moment’s sorry state of things."
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"The offbeat premise is intriguing, but the writer fails to take it all the way, choosing a surreal treatment that is visually stunning but intellectually hollow...O’Hara, doubling as director, hasn’t quite decided how he wants us to feel about Jason’s dilemma...Despite being twisted, the Christian symbolism is clever...But it’s alarming to realize that, although the play seems to have come to an end, it’s only intermission and there’s another whole act to go."
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"We wait for comic gold to materialize, but it never does as 'Mankind' plods along for a leaden two hours...Offers neither the wit nor bite of O'Hara's earlier plays...My mind remained thoroughly unblown by a play that is not nearly funny enough to compensate for all its plot deficiencies...O'Hara serves as his own director, resulting in a saggy presentation that betrays an almost religious reverence for the text...No characters ever rise above a broadly drawn sketch."
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“O’Hara’s wild gender politics satire...While the plot gets a little muddy in the second act...’Mandkind’ is so high-charged with imagination and audacity for its first half that the fumes of creative energy keep pushing it forward...Though the plot involves Feminism, ‘Mankind’ is more about the better side of men in their attempts to understand women; often looking foolish in the process, but still well-meaning.”
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“A ponderous, largely laugh-free affair that begins on a mildly inventive revue-sketch note and quickly proceeds to box itself in, leading to a second act that roams far and wide in search of a salient comic point...O'Hara's satire is so vague and generalized as to be toothless...The production coasts on the considerable charisma of its leading men...A satire without much sting -- O'Hara gets so tangled up in the details of his dystopia that his outrage is rather badly muffled.”
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"The play's very funny, very human opening is unfortunately quickly subsumed by a host of big ideas and controversial social issues...It all feels scattershot, and as a result, 'Mankind' is as frustrating as it is enervating...The second act is even loopier and more meandering than the first...Above all else, 'Mankind' lacks a self-reflective level of irony that might have made the play more successful as social satire...The play might have been more appropriately titled 'Mansplain.'"
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