"An alternately intriguing and irritating production...Questions tease and tickle throughout 'The Moors,' which as you may have gathered has a high whimsy quotient. But they never acquire much momentum in Mike Donahue’s production...'The Moors' may sometimes feel sloppy, but it’s smart. Watching it is a bit like having a conversation with an ardent and intelligent Brontë devotee, whose passion almost matches that of the pen-wielding sisters who inspired it."
Read more

"Jen Silverman's misfire 'The Moors' does, in truth, take aim at an interesting target...But the play keeps sabotaging itself. When it tries to be mystical, its jokiness undoes it; when it tries to be warm and silly, the story's fog of cruelty chills the air. The play's lowest moments are—as is often the case these days—forced injections of magic realism...Despite some truly great actors in the cast, the tonally confused performances move at a crawl."
Read more

"Erodes the viewer’s patience for whimsy long before it can effectively make an argument or illuminate anything real...The play keeps undermining itself with falseness on the one hand and weak attempts at humor on the other...You can’t really blame the four actors playing humans for not finding a tone that works, nor even the director, Mike Donahue...The fault is in the conception of the story, which wants to have its camp and eat it too."
Read more

"Jen Silverman's laugh-out-loud dark comedy gently spoofs the Brontë sisters while treating us to a humorous (and brutal) take on the instability of gender roles...Silverman and director Mike Donahue have created an atmosphere in 'The Moors' that is at once mysterious, menacing, and savagely funny...Despite a few drowsy moments and an odd fantasy sequence near the end, 'The Moors' delights with its insightful and subversive edginess."
Read more

“Silverman's flat, uninflected voice provides no pleasure whatsoever. It's rather like listening to a humorless academic analyzing a text…Still, the production has a look and sound that establish an effectively creepy mood…‘The Moors’ offers satire without any real verve or wit; Silverman neither suggests what is alluring about the Gothic romance genre nor does she provide a particularly trenchant critique of it....Her depiction of it lacks affection and fresh insight.”
Read more

"Silverman's genre-bashing stylistic mishmash is indeed clever and intermittently amusing given its flavorful seasoning of feminism, sadism, plus meditations on happiness and nontraditional love...Realizing this is meant to be a satire, Silverman seemed to work overtime to make us laugh a lot. Consequently, while the cast is admirable, ultimately 'The Moors' is too clever by half to be as successful a riff on Gothic literature as it aims to be."
Read more

"The reviews of the Yale production suggest that another mode of both direction and design might have made a difference. As it stands, The Playwrights Realm's staging of 'The Moors' is a failure that might have been avoided, though the play does not go as far as it ought in trying to be a satire of the 19th century novels as written by the great Victorian women authors."
Read more

“A surprising and entertaining play...Silverman’s script mines the comic potential in the Victorian novel’s standard motifs…Director Mike Donahue keeps the action moving at a crisp pace…His cast, without exception, rises to the challenge of playing this bizarre drama…’The Moors’ seems at first like a trifle...But as it progresses, it goes deeper. Ultimately, this wildly entertaining play also manages to say something profound about human nature, social change, and, yes, the power of writing."
Read more