"Gripping...Some of those moments flirt with inconsequence or facile symbolism...Another confidently expressive staging by Neugebauer, makes it coolly legible...On-the-nose moments...sometimes left me feeling that 'Mary Page Marlowe,' however gorgeously acted, might not be hiding much of anything in the switchbacks of its distorted chronology. But with patience, and some unscrambling to restore the story’s natural order in your head, you may find a few powerful American themes arising."
Read more

"Fascinating...While the play’s wide scope keeps the audience at a bird’s-eye remove, its components are vivid close-up snapshots. Director Lila Neugebauer keeps Mary Page in hard, revealing focus even as the character sometimes smudges herself in denial or passivity. 'Mary Page Marlowe' combines moments of crisis into a longer view of time. It approaches life—this one life—with something that feels like wisdom."
Read more

"Intermittently compelling, ultimately vanilla...It’s not hard to pick out the big themes in Letts’s play, which is part of what can make it feel surfacey despite its attempt to go deeper...It’s a tricky dance Letts is doing, as the man who’s literally pulling the levers and stipulating the roles in Mary Page’s life, while she grapples with her flickering consciousness of the fact that she’s allowed men to do just that. I wish I could have seen the character rebel against the playwright a little more."
Read more

“I called it ‘the most purely beautiful play that Mr. Letts has given us’ in my review of the Chicago premiere, and now...it looks—if possible—even more impressive...The plausibility of this production is also owing in large part to the six actors who play Mr. Letts’s small-town everywoman, all of whom look and sound as true to life as a sequence of snapshots by a master photographer. No less worthy of praise is the equally masterly staging of Lila Neugebauer."
Read more

"A frustratingly non-impact and not particularly well-acted drama...The play nags from the get-go...The script drops references to puzzles and quilts – two decent metaphors for piecing together a whole from disparate parts. In the end, this accountant’s story reminds that not every balance sheet or life — or play — adds up."
Read more

"Director Lila Neugebauer, who brilliantly grasped the big theatrical gestures in 'The Wolves' at Lincoln Center, is just as scrupulous about defining small but definitive moments...The episodic structure is as integral to the play as its content. It’s up to us to fill in the blanks, because this is how life is lived, in little fits and starts that we later recall and either re-live in our minds or decide to forget."
Read more

"It's a testament to the sensitivity of Lila Neugebauer's production of 'Mary Page Marlowe,' and the subtle connective thread binding the half-dozen actresses playing the title character at various ages, that the silences are when Tracy Letts' drama achieves its sharpest poignancy...The unimpeachably naturalistic dialogue reveals major and minor shadings throughout, but it's in the brief wordless moments of overlap during scene changes that the play's quiet force creeps up on you."
Read more

"What Letts is doing is technically neat. Hopscotching through decades, he’s controlling the flow of information...Neugebauer’s overly complicated production and structural limitations steadily diminish our investment in Mary...So much joy and tragedy should not make such dull viewing. And yet, when your hero is a passive cipher, it is...Letts is too skilled a writer for individual scenes and passages not to shine in isolation, but the whole leaves you unsatisfied."
Read more