"What Mr. Talbott expects us to derive from his play remains opaque. He is hardly the first to depict the difficult life of the soldier and its punishing psychic toll. Despite the fine acting, 'Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait' succeeds mostly in making us share the mind-addling frustration of its characters, and maybe wondering how Zimbabwe fits into this particular vision of the hazards of war."
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"You can feel the heat and the panic in Daniel Talbott's hallucinatory production, which has the rhythm and texture of a nightmare. Talbott breaks his story into vignettes to evoke time passing and water supply dwindling, punctuated by John Zalewski's electric-misfire sound design. Like the grains of sand on the floor of the stage that audience members must walk through to get to their seats, this one will stick with you for a while."
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"At best, the acting is uniformly strong and the script packs punches with its unsettling imagery...In the end, the play is both obvious and unclear. It hits you over the head and leaves you scratching it."
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"While the atmosphere is there, the play itself doesn’t rise to that level — Daniel Talbott was better at directing his own show than at writing it...The play is too heavy-handed in its use of fantasy scenes and some details don’t track...But the overall vibe is convincingly post-apocalyptic. And the actors are all very good."
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Talbott seems far less interested in the specific geopolitics of the countries he invokes as he is in depicting the horrors to which they might lead. While certainly well-intentioned, it results in a theatrical experience that is both dismal and unenlightening...While only 90 minutes long, 'Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait' feels as tedious as a forced march through the Sahara."
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"Unfortunately, Talbott has nothing pertinent to say...The title is the biggest tell: Each of the four countries has, in its own way, been affected by violent warfare, but the devil is always, always in the details. Lumping them together is an easy way of seeming to make an important statement without really doing so. In 'Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait', Talbott wants us to feel very, very guilty. It would be better if he tried to make us think."
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"Not specifying the locale of the action appears to be an attempt to achieve a metaphorical dimension. It’s really just a pretentious mishmash of battlefield clichés...Irritating though watchable, 'Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait,' by the time of its conclusion feels like an academic theatrical exercise of little consequence."
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"Indeed, there's plenty of ambiguity regarding what here is real and what is fantasy, what can be believed and what shouldn't be. It's possible for different viewers to come away with varying ideas of what they've seen, and that's not a bad thing. Neither aggressively emotional nor prescriptively moral, 'Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, America, Kuwait' presents a measured, thought-provoking, and gripping vision of where today's constant state of war might lead us."
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