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See it if You appreciate new life being breathed into the classics, enjoy a touch of camp with your melancholy, or just want a good, kinky thriller.

Don't see it if You are impatient with mystery, unhappy/ambiguous endings, or plays heavy on dialogue but light on incident. Fool that you are.

Also This is a remarkably staged and performed rendition of a classic that remains compelling and challenging to this day.

By casting the Madame in drag, this production complicates the notions around gender performance and class power central to the text to astonishing effect. Claire and Solange's rehearsals-for-murder, inhabiting the roles of master, killer, Other, and self, rotate around a Northern star that twinkles with camp delight. You might worry this would devolve into a house of mirrors -- artifice upon artifice -- but no, this is where the true magic of these performers intervenes. There is a bitter note of melancholy to each (and a believable, lived-in familiarity between the trio) that cuts through the sugary sweet artifice: a drop of poison in the thé. Isto Barton, Hannah Adrian, and Kasey O'Brien walk a satisfying tightrope from the opening to the end, allowing you to recognize all the while the fiction on top of the fiction we rehearse to get through the sadness of life.... Read more Read less

See it if Character-driven drama and idiosyncratic specificity compel you

Don't see it if You need a clear narrative thrust to keep you engaged

Also A surprisingly tender and meandering story of a quartet in small-town Texas, Corsicana trusts us to find the small, unmelodramatic moments of slow change engaging enough to serve as the engine for the play -- and it's right to do so. These charming characters are served well by fantastic performances and writing which doesn't rest on simple, cloying "truths" about unlikely friendships, etc. Instead, it showcases the challenges and rewards of caring for and about others over the long-term.

The staging and set decoration is admittedly odd, and does little to serve the story though it is, on first glance, visually compelling, but the actors nail their performances and manage the right balance of sincerity and whimsy with the offbeat rhythm of the text. It's a text that feels deeply personal and specific, and it's those specificities that keep this play with very little incident compelling all the same.... Read more Read less