Maker of Odds and Sods

Play Reviews

Reviews are of play scripts, written with a mind to how appropriate they are for performance at TheaterWorks Hartford.

Do You Feel Anger? by Mara Nelson-Greenberg

Absurdity can be great fun and at the start of this show I genuinely giggled at the Freudian slips and lack of tact. The problem with absurdity is that you need to keep coming up with new and clever absurdities to maintain a level of amusement. This show, instead, devolves into increasingly inane absurdities (What is a period? Let me ask my secretary. Oh no, that cannot be. That's horrible. Say it isn't so!). It is clear that the inanity is leading to a moral, but the lack of subtlety is painful. You can see exactly where it is going and how it is going to get there (although, admittedly, I would not have predicted the bathroom scene with profuse bleeding all over the stage, that was just weird). Others may enjoy being bludgeoned over the head by a message, but I could not even finish reading Animal Farm because it was too childishly obvious in its moralizing.

Alexandra Wahl