He Brought Her Heart Back in a Box NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (36)
See it if you are interested in the plays of Adrienne Kennedy and like stark, contemporary staging.
Don't see it if you prefer traditional staging and the cadence of conversation. Read more
See it if you want to experience how a system of racial segregation wounded people & communities in the southern US, & better understand its legacy.
Don't see it if you do not like a theater in which the logic operates not by sequential plot but by image & association. Read more
See it if You can become absorbed in non-linear theater, love amazing sets and really good acting. Want to see a play by a great American writer.
Don't see it if You need a strong narrative (it's there, but you have to observe it), don't like political theater or plays about race in America.
See it if You want to be challenged by a short but deeply thought-provoking play that is elliptical, strange, perplexing, and fascinating.
Don't see it if You want a straightforward narrative or want bang for your buck. You’re easily frustrated by semi-opaque narratives. Read more
See it if you're willing to listen hard. Adrienne Kennedy's plays require an alert ear or you'll get lost amidst her mix of personal and historical.
Don't see it if you can't handle two fragmented, interconnecting monologues about our national history of racism as it plays out in one biracial family.
See it if to see the work of a master playwright, to see young actors take your breath away, to be challenged to explore your own heart
Don't see it if your views on race, romance and risk in life are limited to your own experience. viewing this play requires your imagination as well
See it if you enjoy a well written one act. Beautifully staged and lit. Leaves you wanting more. Haunting and evocative. Kennedy does not disapoint
Don't see it if you are not a fan of short plays, stories with abstract elements. Kennedy has a great script, but the actors must be connected to the work Read more
See it if you enjoy different theatrical experiences and a nuanced look at an awkward period of US history regarding interracial relationships.
Don't see it if you prefer clear plots and more dialogue between characters. These characters barely interact directly.
Critic Reviews (23)
"Because it has been created by Ms. Kennedy, this landscape is as ugly as it is beautiful...Only Tennessee Williams, an early influence, summons a cultural past with such a plangent mix of rhapsody and disgust...Directed with haunting lyricism by Evan Yionoulis...Occupying a mere 45 minutes...it nonetheless seems to stretch and bend through generations of conflict...The physical production may be the most ravishing and organic that a Kennedy dreamscape has ever been given."
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"Starts on a murky note but resonates powerfully in Yionoulis's artful production...The effect is disorienting at first. But once past the puzzlements of the opening scene, the story moves forward with impressive concision and impact."
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"This fragmentary new one-act is so brief and intangible...Feels fascinating but unfinished...Yionoulis does first-rate work with her two young actors: they show a commitment to nuanced, sincere character work...But it's not quite enough to anchor us...A play full of ache and anger, but its exploration of the monstrous national heritage that has helped to bring us to our present moment is so fleeting and fractured that it often feels unmoored."
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"Smaller than her previous plays but is shaped like the shimmering and original scripts that made Kennedy’s name...The new work is too short and thin to thrive on its own, especially for audiences who haven’t seen Kennedy’s work before. How marvellous it would be to experience Kennedy’s new work alongside another version of her parents in love and at war, spinning together and separately as their daughter tries to be if not a divided self then entirely herself."
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"This brief, poetic effort must have great personal resonance for its 86-year-old playwright, but it's the sort of willfully obscure drama that should be accompanied by a syllabus...Yionoulis certainly stages the opaque, dreamlike proceedings gorgeously...Pecinka and Canfield give affecting performances...But even running a mere 45 minutes...the fragmented work is for the most part tedious and uninvolving...Designed more to be studied than appreciated in performance."
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"The play offers no straightforward answers...Still, under the direction of Evan Yionoulis, the obliquity isn't off-putting - it's entrancing...The acting is fittingly hypnotic...Kennedy understands how language can be used. She and Yionoulis take different idioms - those of the South, Elizabethan drama, and 1940s films - and use them to tell a mystery story that speaks to various times and places...Let's hope this story proves intelligible to audiences."
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"It is dreamlike, yet disturbing; simultaneously memorable and evanescent; a wisp of a text with unsettling, revelatory undercurrents. It is, in equal parts, stunning and unsatisfying, and anyone interested in this writer's career will not want to miss it...At times, the staging could do more to clarify the text, which remains stubbornly elusive, even confusing at times...Kennedy remains one of the American theatre's true originals and nobody else has explored this dramatic terrain so boldly."
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“Evan Yionoulis has given Adrienne Kennedy's first play in nine years, ‘He Brought Her Heart Home in a Box,’ an exquisite production at Theatre for a New Audience. Kennedy's most accessible play, it tells a charged story of the Deep South in 1941 and its tragic aftermath, based on her personal experiences and family history. Exploring the topics of race relations, bigotry, the Jim Crow South, and the rise of Nazism in Germany, ‘He Brought Her Heart Home in a Box’ has a hypnotic quality.”
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