"It’s too stylized to be sexy...Trudy’s is the most tentative thread of a production that does not entirely cohere. Patches of it can be hard to follow, and the acoustics sometimes swallow lines before they can land. Yet 'A Song of Songs' possesses a surprising ritual power."
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"The play isn’t really a play. Its 70 minutes are loosely woven, with great big holes where Borinsky, director Machel Ross, and alumni from El Puente programs have placed collective rituals...The deliberately amateurish production gestures at a kind of un-theater, something that’s as much community workshop as it is an entertainment...Only when we’re told during one of the rituals to think of someone we miss does the piece actually knock at our hearts. And look, if you open to the knocking, 'A Song of Songs' will be able to touch you."
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"The play shines as a collective experience, but wavers in its thin story...Under Machel Ross’s fluid direction, there’s also a pleasant, if underdrawn, tactile ingredient in the love story’s staging, as characters frequently knead fresh dough during scenes, in preparation for a later meal...As the evening progressed, it grew increasingly difficult to continue to invest in these characters, who speak in grand proclamations but feel more like mouthpieces for declarations of love than actual people in love, with only fragments of backstories to hang on to and little in the way of actual action on stage."
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"These styles and scenes (more like charming vignettes) easily flow from one into the other in director Machel Ross’s production, which makes dynamic use of El Puente’s abundant square footage and levels. The cast is uniformly strong, especially the third performer, a vivacious Ching Valdes-Aran as Nadine’s godmother who knows a thing or two about the cycles of pain and promise."
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