Log Cabin NYC Reviews and Tickets

"Marginally less homogeneous than the traditional gay play. Unfortunately, it’s also less coherent...To keep the discussion going he is eventually forced into plot improbabilities and surreal workarounds...It’s a shame that the powerful ideas Mr. Harrison means to conjure about mainstream gay people’s 'failure of empathy' are trivialized and in some ways negated by his own failure of empathy: his failure, that is, to make his characters human."
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“There’s potential drama — and comedy — in this situation, if Harrison had the heart for it. Unfortunately, he’d rather just talk about it. There comes a point, roughly midway through the play, when the principals are so talked out on the subject that two of them go against character by having a quickie in the nursery…Conversation, of which there is much, is clever enough, but mostly shallow...Harrison has taken it upon himself to explain it all, at length and ad nauseam.”
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"The undercooked 'Log Cabin' is schematic, lifeless and artificial in its examination of self-absorbed characters...I say characters, but really the six people represented onstage in MacKinnon's extravagantly upholstered production of this flimsy exercise are merely mouthpieces for a range of talking points...The play's core conflict, and it's certainly an interesting one, ripe for dramatization...The trouble is that Harrison hasn't successfully dramatized any of this."
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“Exhilarating and insightful…An uproarious look at parenting, long-term relationships, and the lie of ‘normalcy.’ ‘Log Cabin’ is a howler that will keep you laughing as you watch through the space between your fingers. Harrison deepens his characters in surprising ways as the play progresses, a process supported by clear and multilayered performances…MacKinnon delivers a tight staging, with all of the laugh lines landing and the design elements serving the story.”
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“A cast of prize pills whose activities are so poorly motivated that, after a few minutes, one struggles not to tune them out altogether...MacKinnon's direction is smooth enough, but there is little she can do about the limp dialogue and gaping holes in the script...The arguments are so pro-forma and the characters so thinly drawn that it quickly devolves into a victimization Olympics that neither amuses nor stimulates...This shallow, sour comedy isn't even remotely up to the task.”
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"Jordan Harrison's mostly splendid new comedy at Playwrights Horizons raises questions that raise other questions, and they flow naturally from interesting, compelling characters who manage to be both consistent and surprising...It might all be too much to digest if Harrison's writing weren't so lively and witty...He's helped by Pam MacKinnon's spot-on direction, which wrings additional humor out of silences and subtle reactions."
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"What Harrison is getting at here, and it couldn’t be a more timely consideration, is the challenge of sustaining empathy in a culture increasingly defined (and polarized) by identity and perceived privilege...Overwhelming dilemmas are made to feel intimate, injected with a graceful oddball wit, and thus emerge a little less terrifying, even as they haunt us...Director MacKinnon, an expert miner of the pain and humor that define friendships and family dynamics, also culls sharp, touching performances."
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"This trim play is no gay fantasia on 21st century themes...Ferguson has the fun part, in neurotic Ezra, and he has fun with it; he’s amusing and engaging without being too sitcom-star focus-pulling...It’s director Pam McKinnon whose work is most essential to this play’s success...While the mess of issues and situations hit upon in the play sometimes threaten to overwhelm, the staging and portrayals stay firmly in hand, propelling the play on."
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