"A wrenching and shrewd solo show...Malouf is a rigorous and impassioned actress with liquid eyes and a way of moving from one character to the next with subtle delineation...The play is about our incomplete ability to wrap our heads around a war being fought half a world away, about our finite capacity for empathy...Yet this isn’t a scolding play or a holier-than-thou one. The woman is realizing the limits of her own awareness right alongside us."
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"Zuabi was inspired to write 'Oh My Sweet Land' after conducting a series of interviews with Syrian refugees in Jordan, and sometimes that research becomes glaring. The hunt for Ashraf stops and these secondary stories take over. That's not such a bad thing, though, since they are far more compelling than the central plot...Malouf conveys these side roles with understated elegance...With few exceptions, Zuabi's staging and Malouf's performance regularly cover for an undercooked script."
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"Malouf taps exquisite emotional precision to tell a polyvocal story of the Syrian people’s suffering...Zuabi overworks his metaphor at times and, as the director, seals the deal with an unnecessary concluding flourish, but those gripes are trifles in the bigger scheme of this production, whose hands-down strength is Malouf’s iridescent performance. She translates the range of human emotions that Zuabi relates with the empathy and imagination of the best storytellers."
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"Zuabi sends his audience across time and space, through vivid storytelling, aggressive smells and sounds, and descriptive detail—all imbued with a furious intensity that is not easily shaken...Guided by Malouf’s relentless stare, we become passengers on her character’s impulsive and complicated voyage...This production physically impacts us. Zuabi wants us shaken from our inertia and any sense that this civil war is happening somewhere else."
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