"For a play that is partly about the fear of being found out, 'Thérèse Raquin' is curiously lacking in tension of any kind. It is steeped, instead, in a single shade of morbid resignation…All of the cast members seem to belong to different theatrical universes...Like these characters’ lives, their erotic encounters are nasty, brutish and short. That’s a fair description of the play in which they appear, except for the short part."
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"Evan Cabnet’s production, with its handsome set by Beowulf Boritt, does atmospheric justice to Thérèse’s desperation…Helen Edmundson’s cold-eyed thriller doesn’t shy from the lurid misanthropy of Emile Zola’s 1867 novel or its gothic denouement. But it does give a sharp sense of the limited options available to women. Thérèse may be a shark—but you pity her the way you might a shark in an aquarium."
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"'Thérèse Raquin' suffers from a typical case of adaptation sickness, a digestive malady that almost always results when a playwright eats a Penguin classic. Even a relatively short novel like this one offers too large a meal. The set-ups are lovely, and then comes the hasty glut…The production gets just about everything right...But no skill anyone might apply can reverse the trajectory of a story that dries up just when it gets juicy."
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"'Thérèse Raquin' is a dreary hambone that once was shocking but is now quaint, and Helen Edmundson, whose sole previous Broadway credit was the inept 2007 stage version of “Coram Boy,” has done no better by Zola. The pacing is arthritic…As for Ms. Knightley, she gives the kind of flat, underprojected performance you’d expect from an untrained Broadway debutante with limited stage experience. Her deficiencies are underlined by the excellent acting of Gabriel Ebert and Matt Ryan.”
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"There might have been some fun if there were a smidgen of electricity between Knightley and Ryan. That would have offset the pervading gloom of Beowulf Boritt’s uncharacteristically dispiriting sets and the fussiness of Edmundson’s script....There’s a detachment between the stars I can only describe as fatal, no pun intended…Without heat at its center 'Thérèse Raquin' is a sexless bore."
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"Without high heat and funky musk, this wannabe erotic thriller starring Keira Knightley is bloodless and all wet…It makes for a dispiriting Broadway debut for Knightley…She’s recognized for injecting roles with emotional intensity, but she never finds traction in this choppy adaptation...Just in time for Halloween, 'Thérèse Raquin' and the A-list actress playing her have found themselves stranded in a corny spookhouse. Scary."
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"Although Evan Cabnet’s hammy direction of the first act does elicit uncomfortable laughter, the physical production is exquisite, and by the end of the act the performers have found the raw passion to leave the audience gasping…Knightley and Ryan are ravishing — and articulate — as these fierce bourgeois Macbeths, undone by their own greed and passion...The play ends as it must, in tragedy. But how we do love their misery."
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"Although the actors are magnetic and the Grand Guignol-accented story deliciously juicy, the play veers into overblown histrionics as Therese's hallucinations assume the full-on haunted-house effect of fingernails screeching on a blackboard. A touch more restraint in the accelerating spiral of recrimination, disgust and fear might have kept the action anchored in reality rather than melodrama."
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