The Children NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (362)
See it if you want to see good acting and have much to think about at the end
Don't see it if you want something light Read more
See it if a very deep and well written play that always seems to be taking you someplace else than it really is.
Don't see it if it's ultimately a very dark play with a very sad ending
See it if you like to think about a play after the play is over. Fabulous directing by James Maconald. Ron Cook is excellent as the husband.
Don't see it if you want the best acting you have ever seen. I thought the ladies were not that convincing but the male actor, Ron Cook, was excellent. Read more
See it if you're willing to put some thought into what you're watching. I loved it Covered my ears after not to heat 2 old biddies who didn't get it.
Don't see it if can't appreciate excellent performers in a play that has much to say yet is sprinkled with laught.
See it if you enjoy 3 character British productions with excellent dialog; you like serious plays with some very funny lines
Don't see it if you might find the ending confusing; you have difficulty with British accents; you can't sit through a 1 3/4 hour play with no intermission
See it if You like a clever, well written drama that takes you through some important and weighty issues with humor and grace
Don't see it if you like something frothy, mucical or light
See it if you like solid drama that tackles tough subjects with layers of wit and insight.
Don't see it if you don't like straight dialogue play with a single ordinary setting.
See it if you want to see a thoughtful play about our nuclear age. Very well acted by 3 excellent well known English actors.
Don't see it if you really want to see light plays about fun topics.
Critic Reviews (48)
“A grim post-apocalyptic drama...The cultural issues and character conflicts raised in Kirkwood’s sobering and absorbing new work hark back to the very notion of giving — not gifts, but oneself — for the sake of community and future generations...The visually stylized, well-acted production is directed by Macdonald...It begins slowly and mysteriously...Black humor occasionally pops up...A social drama that is disturbing and thought-provoking.”
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“A very small play about some very big thing, profound, in fact, with its life and death matters...If Kirkwood was aiming to show how life boils down to routine, she did perhaps too good a job, because the minutiae of their lives slows the action...The cast embody the characters with stunning naturalism...MacDonald expertly lulls our expectations before lowering the boom at the end...It's the deceptive ordinariness of it all that makes ‘The Children’ so deeply unnerving.”
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“A quietly upsetting drama...A play that oscillates between thought-provoking and boring...This play is not meant to address a single generation, but it is difficult to emerge from the show not thinking about the baby boomers...Macdonald places these unsettlingly real performances in a handsome production that sadly fails to grab hold of our full attention until about halfway through...Beautifully rendered, none of it adds up to the sustained tension that this play demands.”
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“In British playwiright Kirkwood’s deceptively subtle drama ‘The Children’, three characters in their sixties consider their responsibility to the younger ones living now...Terrific three-member cast...With another author, the 100-minute play might have been shaved down to set up an adventure story of sensational heroism, but the great impact of Kirkwood's drama comes from its naturalism and simple presentation of a moral issue.”
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“In her new play, Kirkwood has imagined an honestly nightmarish situation...However, the playwright compromises herself with some remarkably creaky, old-fashioned plotting. A play designed to disturb ends up producing an oddly lulling effect...’The Children’ is a rather depressing affair, not least because its intentions are so good; however, it leaves one with a sense of the difficulty of dramatizing the issues with which Kirkwood is concerned.”
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“Kirkwood's all too believable play about the aftermath of a nuclear accident, is much more than a cautionary dystopian tale...The intact transfer is a fortuitous one, resulting in a polished ensemble piece that captures a sense of the characters' history...Kirkwood does a wonderful job of revealing the details of the accident by weaving bits of information into conversations that are otherwise laced with domestic chatter...and the sort of gallows humor that is intended to keep despair at bay."
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“A simmering, ultimately searing drama by Kirkwood...Superb three-member cast...A quiet but exquisitely well-observed slice of life, set in an all-too-easily foreseeable future, when life itself has become, well, more thinly sliced...MacDonald calibrates the play’s subdued but unmistakable nuggets of conflict expertly...’The Children’ does dawdle a bit here and there...But the preciseness of the play’s naturalism is integral to its quiet impact, as well as its larger meanings.”
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“The way Kirdwood's tackled climate change is cause to rejoice. She's not only taken on that more problematic than ever issue but managed to weave it into a potent mix of polemic and fact inspired fiction...Remarkably fresh, absorbing, disturbing, and entertaining...The actors and the script's detours into humor and bonding...keep us engaged in this dark story's at times overly slow, and perhaps ten minutes too long, creep towards its inevitably disturbing ending.”
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