“Erie is portrayed by that excellent actor Forest Whitaker, in a transfixing yet modest Broadway debut.…Mr. Whitaker quietly breaks your heart…I hope his performance isn’t under-appreciated because it lacks showy bravado…'Hughie' feels as vaporous as smoke, though the kind that might come from an opium pipe...you could glean its shape and substance in a 20­-minute reading of the script. But you wouldn’t feel the full mortal ache and ghostly chill that this production summons.”
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“The accomplished film star speaks Erie’s lines, but he misses the spirit of the character, leaving an unmistakable void not to be confused with the playwright’s poetic nihilism…When he should be a big-talking con man and Runyonesque swell, Whitaker tries something possibly more realistic, but ends up blunting O’Neill’s punchy lines...‘Hughie’ is only an hour long. But as we wait for Whitaker to gain confidence in his character, the night grows long and weary.”
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“A huge set for a small play is usually compensating for something. In Michael Grandage’s production of 'Hughie', it’s pretty clear what that something is. Whitaker, who does 98 percent of the talking in the 60-minute one-act, hardly makes an impression…he seems catatonic, with peculiar diction...You spend a lot of the time looking at Wood, a theatrical creature through and through, doing much more with much less.”
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"Together and separately, they’re more than fine actors; they’re poets equal to O’Neill’s poeticism...I wasn’t sure what I thought of the show until a few days after I’d seen it...But later I remembered Whitaker’s gracefulness...Erie is a white character played by a black man, and the complications inherent in that casting keep the production contemporary and important. Nothing significant happens in 'Hughie' except theatre--and the creative lives of its actors."
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“Whitaker has failed to beat the odds in Eugene O’Neill’s ‘Hughie’…Talented though he is, Mr. Whitaker is a film actor through and through, a pure naturalist accustomed to being seen by the camera rather than presenting himself to a live audience, and his bright, bouncy performance is as devoid of depth as his piping tenor voice…Mr. Wood is infinitely better equipped to keep up his end of the deal.”
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“It’s a brave, if odd, choice for a Broadway debut, this meager work that reads better than it plays…The biggest miscue of Michael Grandage’s production is that Erie seems to believe his bullshit. Whitaker lacks the sense of desperation that O’Neill says will overcome Erie during the course of this dark hour…The result is a failure to lift this small work into the tragic realm to which it aspires…That’s surely as much O’Neill’s fault as Whitaker’s. But it’s Whitaker we’ve come to see."
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“This 'Hughie' is hooey. It’s not that Whitaker’s acting is bad in this high-profile revival. It’s that this likeable Oscar winner is not doing any discernible acting to speak of…Whitaker, known for emotionally vibrant performances is simply reciting his lines…Christopher Oram’s scenic design is an unqualified success…If you tire of Whitaker’s disconnected talk, gaze at the faded tin ceiling or the broken elevator.”
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“There’s not really much of an arc to this one-hour play, which is essentially an extended monologue…Both actors have their best moments during this tug of wills. Wood makes Charlie’s silence seem both menacing and merciless, while Whitaker lays bare Erie’s terror…there’s no pretending that ‘Hughie’ is much more than a warm-up for ‘Iceman’, a far more devastating study of life as living death.”
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