Susan Barrett: Reviews
TalkinBroadway.com: Benny
“When you open up a can of worms, you never know what you’re going to get: caviar or worms.” That sage advice is perfectly representative of Benny, Suzanne Bachner’s sparkling and unpredictable play at the Midtown International Theatre Festival: head-scratching and twisty, yes, but ultimately wise, and very difficult to extract from your head after exposure.
The line is spoken by Marcie (Susan Barrett) to the daughter, Anna (Morgan Lindsey Tachco), she abandoned at a Jewish orphanage about two decades earlier. (Anna’s nickname there, for no reason anyone can recall: “Benny.”) Anna’s quest to unearth her true roots hasn’t turned out quite as she hoped. Marcie is thrilled, of course - no can of worms, Anna - but Anna is unsettled by Marcie’s attempts to reintegrate her into an enormous family Anna has never known or cared anything about. Does Marcie love Anna at all, or does she merely love collecting new relations?
The pair’s conflict is only part of Anna’s story, but it’s emblematic of every trouble in this young woman’s life. She has constant disagreements with her alternately nosey and disinterested father (Bob Celli). She’s fallen in love with Shane (Tim Smallwood), who reveals his abusive and alcoholic colors too late for Anna to prevent permanent damage. And she’s still recovering from giving - and losing - her heart to Max (Danny Wiseman), an older family friend who treated and discarded her in ways that should never happen to anyone, let alone an underage girl. […]
Read the full Talkin Broadway review here.
New York Times: 4 Women (And Who Needs Any Men?)
“There are still too few plays that grant women an equal opportunity to be compelling. Not just above and beyond their relations to men, but also beyond the sentimental and the formulaic feminine: mothers and daughters who meet at the beauty shop, say, or single women who’ve found professional success but still wish and hope for romantic fulfillment. […] What a pleasure, then — and how moving it is — to see Rona Munro’s ”Bold Girls.” […] The characters are four women whose lives are a jumble of the everyday and the extreme. […] Marie (Susan Barrett) has been a widow for two and a half years; she is shapely, plump and stoically good-hearted. […] Marie is truly generous, even a bit naïve. (The others tease her for feeding birds every day.) But a certain level of naïveté is her shield. She permits herself only loving memories of Michael, her husband; the children need them, yes, but more to the point, she does. Those memories are her survival mechanism. […] There is a perfect balance between what happens to the women and what happens inside them. Their impulses are as dangerous as gunshots; their personal secrets are as risky as their husbands’ political ones. And this balance is matched by the ensemble work of the four actors. Together and apart, their work is emotionally rich and full of moving details. […] We feel the contradictions inside and between these women at each moment. We feel their struggle to improvise within the implacable boundaries of their world.”
Read the full New York Times review here.
New York Times: A Cookie-and-Coffee Prelude To Slitting a Stranger’s Throat
Bad people provide good company in the entertaining one-act plays by Rooster Mitchell being presented by the 29th Street Rep under the informative title ”Buffalo Kill: Two Brutal Comedies.”
The plays are set five years apart in the same remote cabin in the woods south of Buffalo, and each provides a satisfyingly dead body at the conclusion.
The more complex, skillful and rewarding of the two is ”Never the Same Rhyme Twice,” directed by Michael Hillyer, which brings together four successful, moneyed businesswomen for their regular poker game. Their business, it happens, is con artistry. But on this particular occasion, a partnership problem — partnership in several senses — occupies Sam (Paula Ewin), Jo (Elizabeth Elkins), Tommi (Ruby Hondros) and Charlie (Susan Barrett).
It seems that Tommi has cheated on her husband during a trip by the women to Atlantic City, and someone has told him. So while the cards and hundred- and thousand-dollar bets fly, the women — who represent a wide spectrum of relationships — discuss such topics as sex, rejection, marriage, divorce, penis size and betrayal. The playwright shows a splendid ear for realistic speech, and the excellent cast does him proud. […]
Read the full New York Times review here.
Time Out NY: Kill Bill
Hilarity and murder meet at a cabin in the woods in these two one-acts by Rooster Mitchell. Directed by Tim Corcoran, ‘Killer’ has a Catskills shtickster (whose car gets a flat) at the door of a greasy hovel inhabited by a psycho-woodsman who gets his sexual yayas from torturing and murdering unsuspected travelers. The jokes start to roll and the pressure mounts as these two fine actors bring us a gory and unpredictable climax.
‘Never the Same’ finds four wise-gals at a neat cabin hideaway. Sam, Jo, Tommy and Charlie are scam artists who use this haven to drink, gamble and talk about the “shows” they’ve pulled and the men they’ve had along the way. The stakes are high at this goon-gal gaming table, as secrets and hidden agendas start to sour the mix. Michael Hillyer’s flawless direction, an amazing cast (Susan Barrett is delightfully wicked as Charlie), 1000 RPM dialogue and an explosive conclusion make Never one of the slickest pieces of Off-Off theater going.
Star Ledger: Star-crossed lovers light up ‘Clair de Lune’
“Two of the biggest no-nos in dating are “Don’t go out with someone you work with” and “Don’t have sex on the first date.” Luckily for theatergoers, the title characters of “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” — Terrence McNally’s 1987 comedy — break both those rules. Even luckier, director Lauren Moran Mills gives the play a spirited rendering at the Women’s Theater Company in Parsippany. Frankie’s a waitress and Johnny’s the short-order cook in a diner. Tonight, on a whim, they go out to dinner and a movie. Afterward, to their surprise, they wind up making beautiful music together — as beautiful as Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” which is playing on the radio during their tryst. […] As Frankie, the husky-voiced Susan Barrett excels in creating a woman of 41 who long ago learned that miracles don’t happen. She excels in showing a polite lack of optimism. “I like you,” she tells Johnny, sounding like someone who’s scratching an adorable pooch under the chin. Barrett calibrates her performance wonderfully, so chink after chink appears in her substantial armor. Still, when Johnny says she’s pretty, Barrett rebuffs the compliment with a scowl and a dismissive wave. ”
Read the full Star Ledger review here.
OOBR (Off Off Broadway Review): A Healthy Pulse’
The debate over just how political is the personal has obsessed a good many playwrights to not much worthy effect. Caryl Churchill, though, has consistently cast an edifying light on the subject. Her 1982 Top Girls was recently revived by the Pulse troupe in a sterling production that truly cut to the heart of the issue. […] As the Frascatti flows, stories are shared of remarkable exploits and ordeals. One strand of experience seems to thread through each of their lives, though: each has lost a child. […] The cast actually worked better as an ensemble than the cast of the original production at the Public Theatre (dominated as it was by Linda Hunt’s presence). Susan McGeary was a volatile swirl of conflicted emotions and impulses, making each one wholly believable. Susan Barrett’s broad turn as an armor-clad maiden in the first scene was quite funny, and her and Claudia Traub’s performances as two underlings at Marlene’s agency were rich and layered. Warm and earthy at their centers, they still had a cold, hard edge to them. Christine Jones’s Isabella Bird was a bit stiff, but her later incarnation as an older woman seeking employment was supremely intelligent; a lady of obvious inner strength forced to shed her dignity in the search for a job in a fibrillating economy. Elizabeth Cloe had similar success in a like character, a teenager trying to pass as older, again in desperation for a job. […]
Read the full OOBR review here.
The Bridgeton News: Theater Festival Opens at Deertrees
Review of Park Your Car in Harvard Yard.
More reviews coming soon!