"Dawkins lets a surfeit of biographical information overwhelm his play...Slipping in and out of realism, blending biography with melodrama and camp, Mr. Dawkins’s play is mostly a lot of talk...This is the dialogue of characters obliged to fill in not only the details of their lives, but also the themes, along with unsubtle allusions to their plays...Tony Speciale’s bumpy production feels like it needed more time to find its groove, and for the actors to hone their performances."
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“The absence of sexual chemistry between our two protagonists feels like a lost opportunity to explore how gay relationships often defy easy categorization...Speciale delivers an admirably physical staging of this talky play, but the tone occasionally slips into farce...It's amusing to watch, but detracts from what the characters are actually...Dawkins gives us some of that in an epilogue that is unsatisfying as an ending, but also the best writing in the play.”
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"Entirely frivolous and free of insight...Substitutes sitcom boisterousness for anything like real feeling...A head-scratcher...The main trouble...aside from the fact that it dawdles badly, indulging itself with too many coarse jokes, is that neither Dawkins nor Speciale have much feeling for the characters...When given a halfway decent line, Villa gives it some zing...But the performance is pitched too high, noisily pushing for laughs, so we get almost no sense of the conflicts.”
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“A ludicrously presumptuous two-act play...All the unlikely cat-and-mouse behavior—Williams the cat, Inge the mouse—is additionally undercut by the odd casting. Villa does bear a strong resemblance to Williams, although he portrays the playwright as unusually confident and without the slightly distrait air the playwright so often exhibited.”
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"Williams' narration comes at us at a furious clip and with a dazzling ferocity that could easily make the unprepared a bit dizzy even as it delights the rest of us...The play is at its best in the first half when it celebrates the unlikely attraction of two gifted gay bachelors who couldn't be more different...Whatever the dramatic liberties taken by the playwright, they don't seem so farfetched but are credible and cleverly integrated."
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"Philip Dawkins' humorous and poignant 'The Gentleman Caller,' which is still running in Chicago in its world premiere production, is a fascinating and intimate view of two very famous American playwrights whose private lives may not be so well known to the public. While the depiction of William Inge leaves much to be desired, Juan Francisco Villa's exceptional portrayal of the young Tennessee Williams is one you will not soon forget."
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"The contrast between Villa, overacting his mustachioed, annoyingly pompous character, and Isaac's repressed, prissy Inge…suggests a literary version of 'The Odd Couple'…Bitchiness…is pervasive in 'The Gentleman Caller,' which revels in the men's attraction for one another…and the cattiness of their sniping...The play is also unconvincingly preoccupied with imagining…Williams and…Inge engaging in lots of sexual or romantic hanky-panky, including an outlandish bit of voyeurism."
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“Dawkins’s raucous comedy...Or, looked at another way...fact-based drama...This production tries to have it both ways and, for the most part, it succeeds...Villa sometimes looks and sounds like a young Orson Welles...Villa’s grandiosity is in keeping with the playwright’s larger than life reputation...Isaac has more room to mold the lesser known Inge and manages a fine balance between comic and suicidal desperation...Speciale knows how to build laughs while drawing out tension.”
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