Catch As Catch Can NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (26)
See it if a three-handed drama about childhood friendships and the life they grow into sounds something you would find interesting.
Don't see it if strife between friends and family barely surviving life is just to close to your real life, and you just need a night to escape the drama. Read more
See it if you want to be challenged.
Don't see it if you prefer linear exposition.
See it if you want to see a show whose playwright makes so many changes to her original play that it becomes very confusing and hard to undersand..
Don't see it if you like actors who speak clearly. With so many role changes too quickly, the actors have little time to make the different voices clear. Read more
See it if Careful what parents teach their children, it might prove detrimental. Three-actor/six-role two-act comedy/drama. So many dichotomies.
Don't see it if Lost in the shuffle. Better actors could've pulled this off, but the gender & tonal switches from first to second acts make this labourious.
See it if You like watching 3 actors shift into 6 different roles onstage and the resulting effort it takes to sort out who said what to whom.
Don't see it if You don't like plays that start off as a self-conscious comedy and abruptly shift into a suicidal drama for no reason and with no pay off.
See it if Virtuosic actors play multiple roles of different genders/generations in a heartbreak family drama. Funny/ebullient act 1; sad/tragic act 2.
Don't see it if The two acts are so different. Maybe the point is that the bonds of family & friendship are fragile? The acting alone is well worth seeing
See it if If you like smart, adventurous writing performed by an exquisite cast.
Don't see it if If you're lazy and don't want to engage the playwright's mind.
See it if the NY preem of a terrific writer with a lot on her mind about identify formation, inheritances, and much more. beautifully acted & directed
Don't see it if if you have trouble engaging with demanding, formally ambitious work, this may not be for you
Critic Reviews (3)
"Under Ken Rus Schmoll’s direction, typically cool and precise, they differentiate their roles but also twin them, showing how parents are echoed in their children.
Does all that structural sophistication serve the play? The doubling, though often masterly (I’d swear Ms. Serralles’s pants fit her differently as Daniela than as Lon), makes it harder to pin down any one character...It makes some scenes harder to parse, which dulls the play’s horror."
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"So smoothly virtuosic that it takes a while to realize how good it really is...Afterward, reflecting on the play, you may marvel at how finely Chung has woven her thematic threads (about family, heredity, nationality, genetics) into the tapestry that unravels with such violence in the play’s second half. This is challenging material, but the actors come through with stunning work...'Catch as Catch Can' is what Off Broadway theater can be at its best. Don’t miss it."
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"'Catch as Catch Can’ is multiple plays in one. The first act is a play exploring the notions of family, love, and how our responsibility to each shifts from generation to generation. I was interested in this play, but then it was lost to the second act, which seemed an entirely different play about mental illness. I similarly would have watched a piece with this issue as its main focus, however, within the frame of this larger piece, that ‘play’ felt incomplete and underdeveloped.”
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