"Kidwell, who is black, and Sheppard, who’s white, have exactly the opposite intent. Both are smart, vibrant performers who, abetted by director Taibi Magar and a talented design team, evoke slavery’s poisonous and enduring legacy with daring, intuitive theatricality...The audience members around me alternately laughed, sucked in their breath and sat in stunned silence...This accomplished, compelling play, suggests that the arc of justice has not yet been permanently derailed."
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“An unusually entertaining piece...Hilarious and provocative and original...This unconventional and decidedly unsettling work presents a bold, thought-provoking consideration of racial and sexual assumptions that does not provide any answers but certainly will spark conversation...The play is fearlessly performed...Smart writing and sharp interplay are enhanced by the fluency of Magar’s subtle staging that seamlessly shifts events between real and surreal...Delightfully adventurous show.”
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"Sheppard and Jennifer Kidwell have fashioned a captivating work of theater that is bravely acted, inventively designed, and relentlessly surprising — dizzying in its anarchic turns from playful to hateful, satiric to sadistic...Since the surprises are much of what made the show feel so theatrically explosive to me, I am reluctant to disclose many details...Now, it’s hard to miss the pointed commentary beneath both the humor and the ferocity in the show."
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"This hilariously discomfiting examination of race, sex, and power...The audience is occasionally induced to be the student body at an assembly...The play, which jumps rapidly from the lesson plan to fantasies and surreal episodes, is so crammed with material that it is hard to believe that it is only 75 minutes long...I was alternately amused, annoyed, shocked and baffled. I don’t know whether you will love it or hate it, but I can guarantee that you won’t be bored."
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"In-all-ways sensational...This production lures you into its seemingly sunny classroom with the snarky cheer of a hip comedy sketch. But as its title promises, this play winds up taking you into subterranean territory...The play conjures searing theatrical visuals to match its wayward words, the sort of images that used to send people to Freudian analysts when they cropped up in nightmares...Manages to be...shocking in ways that 'Dutchman' must have been 50-some years ago."
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"There's a hint of race war in the color war–style kids’ game for which Jennifer Kidwell and Scott Sheppard’s outrageously funny and discomfiting show is named...The taboo-flouting script is matched by bold, smart performances from both actors...At the performance I attended, the laughter and shock of the almost exclusively white audience had a tinge of self-flagellation, which felt gratifying—if not, as the play makes clear, necessarily liberating."
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"This riveting, whip-smart performance piece is as daringly unexpurgated as anything you’ll encounter onstage today. It’s an effort to reset the table for the complicated conversation about race that America eternally attempts to start, and always ends up recoiling from in guilt and insecurity and anger…Kidwell and Sheppard are equally magnetic here and yes, truly brave. Along with their savvy director and designers, they play enthrallingly with dynamite."
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"Kidwell and Sheppard have devised an effective vehicle for their talents, one that confidently rides the audience's nerves for 90 minutes, daring us not to be offended and forcing us to think hard about what we're feeling...They play together with unusual finesse, even as they follow the play's argument down some distinctly dark corridors. Taibi Magar's direction keeps us on pins and needles, ricocheting from easy laughter to high tension and back again."
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