Antlia Pneumatica NYC Reviews and Tickets

"Washburn crafts an evening that's at once quiet and disquieting, as beautiful for what it contains as unsettling for what it doesn't. But Washburn has trouble gauging when she goes too far. Eventually she hints at supernatural forces driving the action in ways that defuse the sparks she ignites earlier on...The pacing is Ice Age glacial...The actors, they're all decent, if overblown in one way or another...Memorable though this play may be, it has too much to hang on to."
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"Rachel Hauck’s scenic design is the most outstanding feature of the interminable 'Antlia Pneumatica'...This play’s author Anne Washburn takes a proven dramatically fertile situation and renders it with pretentiousness and vagueness...Creating a work of basic resonance appears to be an anathema to her. The cast are all capable actors. However, with this material their performances uniformly consist of irritating tics and mannerisms."
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"What we learn about the characters is too fragmentary to make us really care...Except for these occasionally engaging conversations, most of the table talk meanders along and leaves us wishing director Ken Rus Schmoll had trimmed it along with that interesting but overlong star-gazing scene in the dark. The actors' performances overall are fine. Too bad they're playing six characters in search of a play by Anne Washburn at her best."
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"The performances were good but not exceptional...Washburn’s naturalistic dialog with overly long, sometimes uncomfortable pauses, made for moments when we no longer cared what a character would say, just so long as they’d get it over with...It’s too full of hot air that fills the space of something we not only can’t see, but also don’t care about."
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"Director Ken Rus Schmoll’s staging is as static as it is pretentious…Ms. Washburn has taken a perfectly good idea for a play and loaded on so much artifice that it collapses under its own weight…The performances offer a glimmer of hope, but there will be no happy ending, just one final return of the poetry zombies, singing a dirge, turning at odd angles from each other for no apparent reason."
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"At its most compelling, 'Antlia's' concern is with mortality and what happens, at a certain age, when death becomes a normal part of life...When the themes turn cosmic, though, 'Antlia' loses its way a bit...Under the crisp direction of Ken Russ Schmoll, the play has the usual lived-in dialogue and lyrical tangents that color most of Washburn's work...There's so much good here, but maybe too much. By wrap it seems like it could have gone with one less metaphor or one less body."
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"The play is a slippery thing happening in three different registers. Much of it is perfectly ordinary. But then it slips a gear, and turns into something darker, richer, and stranger: an invocation, an act of not-so-innocent eavesdropping, a ghost story about one’s own youth...It’s genuinely eerie and unexpectedly moving when the pieces snap together. The dogged literalness of the realist surface play is just a thin skin...the shape beneath is unsettling and magically strange."
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"Characters recall events that they then dismiss as dreams. But the disorientation is not limited to the characters. Most scenes in the play occur on a stage that is lit too darkly to see clearly. In theory, this double disorientation of both characters and audience should be thought-provoking, the atmosphere intriguing. In practice, it comes off as vague...Washburn’s wit and ear for dialogue make attendance worthwhile even when she’s leaving you in the dark."
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