"The poignant new drama turns out to be an unexpected celebration of a marriage of true minds. I mean the kind of meld that occurs when a playwright and a performer seem to blend into a hypernatural unity, making artificial words sound realer than real life...Perez is giving the kind of instinctive yet disciplined, all-out emotional performance that makes you wonder why he hasn’t been doing Brando-stature parts...Masciotti’s distinctively awkward dialogue has never sounded more organic."
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"Masciotti’s best tool is her ear. She hears the twists and malapropisms that give language its occasional wrong-foot poetry...But this time, the comic technique seems out of tune...Here, conventional slides into cliché...Williams creates a lush aural and visual world...But the play turns Dennis into a mockable figure...The characterization lists towards condescension, curdling the play’s attempts at sentiment. It’s all fun and language games until someone really loses."
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“A bold, emotionally explosive peek into the impact of post-traumatic stress…Perez gives a masterful performance...It's an intense, fast-moving setup and Williams' direction and Climer's scenic and costume design are perfectly calibrated for maximum impact…My only criticism is the play never explains what motivated Dennis to enlist…Still, this production packs a lasting punch and forces the audience to grapple with the wounded warriors living in our midst.”
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"Masciotti is thorough, unsparing, and precise about the specifics of Dennis’s existence and the one-step-forward-two-steps-back progress he makes...While these details are important, though, they’re hardly unique, and the play can get bogged down in them...The piece is most interesting–more alive, more energetic, more revealing of interesting facets of character–in the moments that don’t deal with Dennis’s issues in such a head-on and literal way."
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"This resonant piece brings life to the news stories about veterans’ struggles and the larger issues of psychological trauma and a cumbersome VA system...Joel Perez does an outstanding job as Dennis...Director Ben Williams has taken an awkward space and found creative uses for it...An illuminating work of a veteran struggling to get out of the fringes, this is a fast-paced, moving, timely play that brings a humanity to the veteran’s plight, executed with sensitivity and creativity."
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“The discomfort of watching Masciotti’s ‘Raw Bacon’ doesn’t lie in the painful story she wishes to tell. Unfortunately, it comes from the writer’s own failure to tell that story with the complexity, nuance, and imagination it deserves. Directed by Williams, and performed by a solid cast led by Perez, ‘Raw Bacon’ is a surface-grazing take on the classic American tale…Although the production has many virtues, it ultimately falls prey to clichés it would have done better to push against.”
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