Pathetic NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (5)
See it if you want to see a very smart script that manages to break the rules at every turn even as it pays its respects to theater tradition.
Don't see it if loud music, intense feelings, violence to body & mind or blood upset you. Read more
See it if Teenage goddess cults, sex and power relations, bloody violence - what's not to like? Jarcho understands the power of affect and feeling.
Don't see it if The narrative drops off in the 2nd half of the play, so even at its short length, the action could have been more concentrated.
See it if Teenage girls fear & embrace sexual havoc, while mom loathes her loss of desirability. Lust as a destructive, uncontrollable monster.
Don't see it if You don’t like weird absurdist wandering. Nudity, simulated sex & other explicit stuff. Violence. Funny & “pathetic” when taken as a satire.
See it if You want to see a horrifying, bloody take on girlhood.
Don't see it if You have issues with nudity, teenagers, goddess-summoning, or Sonic. Read more
See it if you enjoy a strange teen drama based on a Greek play with topics of sex, violence, raw language. Don't mind noise
Don't see it if you are expecting a light-hearted play. Are offended by nudity, violence, sex and foul language. Read more
Critic Reviews (3)
"Jarcho’s squirmy, sinister meditation on female desire as weapon and a liability...The play replaces Racine’s stately alexandrines with lines about sex and barf and decay. Actually, a lot of those are in hexameter, too; Ms. Jarcho is no slouch...If not entirely legible (as in her other work, Ms. Jarcho prizes theme, emotion, and language over lucidity), it’s unsettling and exciting and flick-knife sharp on the aggression underlying friendship, sex, and love."
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"Stylistically it is a school-locker collage, taped together from John Hughes movies and ‘The Craft’. It’s silly, often, and very funny. But its portrait of libido as our animating electricity is bleak, too: as fatestruck and gloomy as any ancient tragedy...Jarcho writes, as always, like gangbusters, making comic meals for her company members: Williams, who designs and runs the sound when he isn’t in a scene, is particularly hilarious."
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"Jarcho does not pull punches, and her company is not for the faint of heart…'Pathetic' is about female desire and death, but here the themes are in manifest conversation. While the Greek mythology works to repress female sexuality, Jarcho's work exposes the hypocrisy, violence, and oppression of the concept…The play suggests that female desire causes death, both the literal death of characters, but also a moral and psychological death, a powerful obverse feminist statement."
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