Hart Island NYC Reviews and Tickets
About the Show
Production Covid-19 Safety ProtocolsShow-Score Member Reviews (3)
See it if you want to escape the usaul proscenium arch. A beach has been created for actors to wander while sharing their memories of Hart Island
Don't see it if you are expecting the usual plot twists. While character driven the stories rarely interact or conflict.
See it if You want to be challenged to think and feel at the same time, love something edgy and different
Don't see it if You need a straightforward narrative, don't like text that is more like poetry than dialogue, need to be made happy at the theater
See it if A noble effort calling attention to the 'potters field' at Hart Island in the East River; from Civil War thru Covid the dead lay anonymous
Don't see it if Sadly, the drama is to diffuse & scattershot to fully impact w/characters undefined & confusing A grating narrator does further harm
Critic Reviews (5)
"The show describes itself as a 'theatrical multimedia meditation,' which means that it’s purely atmosphere: On Christopher and Justin Swader’s long horizontal set – an open trench that somehow smells of moist earth — director Kristjan Thor has actors amble around and murmur about abandonment."
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"Characters seem to be at once on Hart Island, in the stories as they are relaying them, and in a support group, all of which are conveyed by Christopher and Justin Swader's multi-tier set. A level of mulch brings the earth into the theater and seems to contain secrets, like an archeological site. Mentally, you'll still be digging hours after the end of the play as you entertain connections between these characters that might not be immediately apparent."
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"Similar to the set design, the play is heavy. There is a lot of emotion on the stage that can take some time to settle. The stories of these characters and of the history of Hart Island stick with you well after you leave that gym. It's the bodies that are buried there that haunt you, yes, but so much more. There is a lighter reflection here too. A sense of how tragedy can bring us all together no matter our background, and unite us in a way we never felt possible."
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Whether or not Tracy Weller’s Hart Island directly harkens back to Masters, it certainly has similarities, most particularly in its poetically rendered revelations of the underbelly of life and death. Weller turns Hart Island, impeccably rendered in Christopher & Justin Swader’s set occupying most of The Gym at Judson, into a dark metaphor revealing more than any statistics or headlines could ever do about existence during the Covid pandemic.
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"Mason Holdings’ haunting 'Hart Island' epitomizes downtown, avant-garde performance at its best: cerebral, theatrical, scrupulously researched, and bursting with heart."
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