"Dr. Gluck is certainly better qualified than I am to comment on the ethics of organ transplants from the young to the old. And perhaps as someone who has spent a career witnessing hard choices, he wanted to let his audience off easy. As a new dramatist, however, it's tantamount to malpractice."
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The battery of shocker revelations keeps things lively, but Our Brother's Son is what Variety used to call a "sudser," with characters and dialogue that feel imported from a long-ago plot arc Guiding Light or Another World. There's no nuance or shading in the writing, just a ton of exposition followed by a series of bombshells that cue plenty of finger-pointing.
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Freshman playwright Charles Gluck, a retired gastroenterologist who has finally followed his dream to write a play, has turned out one terrific piece of theater. There is virtually no superfluous dialogue in this script; almost every line serves a specific purpose, whether it’s to provide key exposition, continue to build the play’s fully three-dimensional characters or to accelerate and intensify the dramatic through point.
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Our Brother’s Son suffers from single-issue doldrums exacerbated by symptoms of contrivance, cliché, and casting. It needs a script doctor more than a doctor playwright to prescribe a remedy for relief.
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The premise of “Our Brother’s Son” is a promising one, and Charles Gluck, though a first-time playwright, might seem like the right person to explore it: He was a practicing physician for thirty years. But, while the play seems initially like a workmanlike family dramedy, it begins to feel like a missed opportunity, until it takes a sharp turn into an outright misfire.
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Despite family secrets being revealed, two brushes with death, a constantly rotating set and repeated storming out of the house, not all that much happens in Our Brother’s Son, a passable but toothless drama by career gastroenterologist turned first-time playwright Charles Gluck.
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