"A cool, carefully composed and frightening work...Directed with an uncompromisingly clear eye and steady hand by the gifted Lee Sunday Evans...Deploying a style that evokes Brechtian distance without its polemical fireworks, Massini aspires to what might be called a god’s eye view, as dispassionate and relentless as history itself...By the end, almost without your knowing it, they have given us a profound assessment of the toll taken by witnessing and chronicling what Politkovskaya saw."
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"You'd be hard-pressed to find anything other than statements of fact in Massini's script—a format...very much in line with Politkovskaya's passionately dispassionate reporting...The overwhelming priority of 'Intractable Woman' is truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth...Evans has crafted Massini's flexible piece around three women, all of whom stand firmly through their delivery of some truly gruesome information."
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"'Intractable Woman' isn't a play in the conventional sense: There is no conflict, no real drama, just a series of terrible events as seen through the journalist's camera eye. Yet the details are so gripping that it is impossible to look away, no matter how much one may wish to. It's a tribute to the taut direction of Evans that the piece never becomes forbidding; the three-person cast specializes in a highly disciplined delivery that evokes these ghastly events without wallowing in them."
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"A noble exploration of the murdered Russian journalist that is insufficiently realized for the stage...It must be assumed that the production’s lackluster presentation is the concept of director Lee Sunday Evans...The performances are in the mode of recitation rather than distinctive characterizations, resulting in a lack of emotional impact...This underwhelming production does not do justice to Massini’s fine writing that conveys the profound achievements of this heroic figure."
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“A depressingly relevant play about the necessity, the impossibility, and the complexity of ethical, unbiased journalism...The overall mood...in both Wing’s excellent translation...and Evans’s stripped-down direction, is a clear-eyed insistence on recognizing and recording...A Brechtian-style alienation effect that feels well suited to the play’s tone...The quietness and restraint of both writing and performances only underscore the horror and the urgency of the subject matter.”
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"No attempt is made to sharply differentiate one actress from the other...Never do the women drop their detached tone to project the feeling of being immediately, personally endangered…Audiences unfamiliar with the…issues will learn something…from the narrative but with very little historical information or explanation… A cleanly executed piece of docudrama…As a theatrical experience…it remains too dispassionate an account of material demanding a stronger jolt of passion."
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"Director Lee Sunday Evans does a superb job preventing the play from becoming didactic, pedantic, or just plain boring; the dialogue interplay among the three equally excellent actresses, who move chairs around in various scenes, keeps things proceeding at a fluid pace."
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