"I couldn’t help feeling late on as if the tail is wagging the dog here: events happen not because they would do so organically but because they have to happen in a certain way in order to prove a point."
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“The acrimony-flecked confab holds attention, and has a clear topicality...But with the characters little more than mouthpieces, the aura of orchestrated debate rather than organic drama is inescapable. A halfway house, then, between hit and miss.”
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“The script teems with knotty ideas about the erasure of black history by colonialists, the way white people moved through guilt to a perception of their own victimhood, and the notion that younger black people are exhausted by talk of race.”
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"It’s all quite straightforward and never quite escapes the shadow of the two plays that have inspired it. But those ideas do grip, compelling attention."
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“Cherrelle Skeete is tremendous throughout as Beneatha, a compelling mix of the impassioned, the vulnerable and the resolute. It would be a stretch to say we really get to know her, though. So these conversation pieces divert and stimulate, but forever feel like a clutch of smart starting points for a story rather than the finished thing.”
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“Its resonance is substantially bolstered by its intertextuality and, without that context, its plotting is exposed as contrived. But its arguments, if sometimes baldly polemical, remain urgent and fecund, and Kwei-Armah’s own production is led by Cherrelle Skeete’s compelling and deeply felt performance as Beneatha.”
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“The play is a panoramic satire which engages thought-provokingly with Hansberry and Norris.”
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“Always engaging, the play never quite ignites. Kwei-Armah’s dialogue often lands squarely on the nose, and the fervid culture wars rhetoric remains thin. The playwright’s own production can feel staid, lining up academics across the stage.”
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