"Mae’s quest to rise above the squalor that surrounds her might indeed seem touching, if handled well. But director Araoz’s revival feels more like an exhumation...Henry skews Texas, and everyone seems to slip in and out of a drawl...Mae’s struggle for ascendancy mostly seems ludicrous as Fornés’s brief play inches slowly toward its heavy-handed finale. What may have been shocking in 1983 seems, in this production, a muddy exercise in miserabilism.”
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“This unrelievedly grim tale of rural poverty and toxic affection has been given a realistic production by Elena Araoz which only deals with one level of the play. The dialogue is poetic, controlled and repetitious, endlessly turning back on itself in an attempt to show these lives of quiet desperation. However, in the tiny Teatro Círculo, Regina García's setting which has the audience practically sitting in the kitchen of a country shack increases the claustrophobia inherent in the script.”
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"Araoz follows the playwright’s stage directions closely, including having the play’s seventeen short scenes end in a freeze frame...The characters speak with accents suggesting hill people of Appalachia...This is not a major problem—it just detracts from the universality of these characters...'Mud' possesses a kind of stark power, fueled here by the earnest, workmanlike performances of the three cast members. The standout for me was Avidon."
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“Fans of Fornés will recognize how the sparse language serves an immersive spatial experiment...Nicole Villamil as Mae takes on hope against a suffocating despair...Julian Elijah Martinez has impressive stamina and a charisma that buoys a dirge with energetic humor...Araoz has put together a fully realized production that makes every moment a story told in gesture. It is at times horrifying, but honest in its brutality and severe in its simplicity.”
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“Humor emerges occasionally in this new production...Fornés provides a smidgen of pity for Lloyd and Henry before finally giving them both the back of her hand; this tricky maneuver stays true to the tone of Fornes' play, which is uncommonly blunt and compressed, closed-down yet also somehow open...May's striving for something better has a slightly sentimental feeling in this production, whereas Fornés seems to have intended something darker and nastier."
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"It is funny, sharp, moving, and happily avoids the pedestrian...The dialogue is chiseled and rigorous like Beckett’s, the environment ambiguous and claustrophobic...This production does lack the image-punch of the original play, the visual grandeur and complexity of the enigmatic stage picture Fornes conceived. But it credibly captures the moment-to-moment nuance of the funny-sad, touchingly sick tale better than most others I’ve seen, and that’s no small accomplishment."
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