Socrates NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (90)
See it if You like a play to make you think. You are interested in philosophy. One of the most well written plays I have seen!
Don't see it if You want action.
See it if you enjoy Ancient Greek history, philosophy and/or politics.
Don't see it if you are sensitive to vulgar actions.
See it if you like theater that challenges you to think about your role in society
Don't see it if you are certain about what you believe and feel it would be a waste of time to reflect on who you are. Read more
See it if you are interested in life and death of Socrates or if you want to see great Michael Stuhlbarg in action.
Don't see it if you are not interested in the historical figure, or can not or do not like to sit through a long play.
See it if You are interested in a challenging theater piece and/or how insecure if unseen tyrants fear anyone who provokes thinking
Don't see it if You are not interested in a play which lacks action or explores philosophers and how thought provokes fear
See it if you want a very thoughtful, engrossing play, long but worth every minute.
Don't see it if you only like fluffy, inconsequential theater Read more
See it if You have an interest in the life of the mind. You want to understand why philosophy is relevant to life. You love drama.
Don't see it if You're not at all curious about how the ancient Greeks created the basis for the modern world. My Big Fat Greek Wedding was enough for you. Read more
See it if Michael Stuhlbarg gives a performance for the ages. The central narrative speaks to our present political crisis.
Don't see it if It’s very heady philosophical stuff. It’s 3 hours. The seats aren’t comfortable. If you don’t have the endurance...
Critic Reviews (22)
"Argument and inquiry are the engines of 'Socrates,' starring a sublime Michael Stuhlbarg in the title role. In a meticulously handsome production by Doug Hughes, this is a play that hums with intelligence...Reverence is a heavy thing, and it weighs down this nearly three-hour play, whose overlong first act is so devoted to showing its prickly and endearing provocateur in his element — that it succeeds more on academic merits than dramatic ones."
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"'Socrates' is dragged down by loquacious speechifying, excessive double casting and the general stasis of Doug Hughes's plant-your-feet-and-spew staging...Just when you're ready to give up, however, the spotlight shifts in earnest to Stuhlbarg's arresting performance as a fascinating, fallible, sometimes frustratingly inflexible man who believed that no idea was too sacred to be questioned...He manages to animate the play’s didactic discussions of virtue, knowledge and democracy."
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“Overlong, dramatically flat...There are so many actors...But only one of these actors really commands our attention...If you can get through the first couple of scenes, it’s intermittently exciting to watch...The fact that the play does eventually manage to pull up and away from it is a great credit to Stuhlbarg...In its best moments, it lets us think alongside a magnificent, humane thinker, and in a world so hungry for generous, rational thought, that’s something."
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"Nelson attempts to bring this historical figure to theatrical life but mainly succeeds in boring the audience...The play can certainly be commended for its intellectual rigor and astute illustration of the Socratic method...But it ultimately comes across as more rhetoric than drama...That the evening succeeds at all is due to a superb starring turn by the brilliant Stuhlbarg...Nelson’s ambitions here get the best of him.”
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“The experience of watching Nelson's ‘Socrates’ is comparable to the experience of sitting down to read Plato's dialogues: intellectually stimulating but dramatically inert...The Socrates we get onstage is no fuller than the sketchy one we get on the page....Nelson's tedious dialogue and Hughes's stilted direction feel overwhelmingly burdened by their source material."
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"Despite the occasional contemporary-sounding reference that may jar a bit, Nelson's play, though a bit stretched out, is generally a fine character study of one of recorded history's earliest known great thinkers...Played by with gentle warmth and humor by Michael Stuhlbarg."
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"Alternating slyly constructed arguments with scorching confrontations and climaxing with a harrowing death scene, it is, arguably, one of the most ambitious offerings of the season; it is also, at times, lumbering, drunk with the power of its own words, and willing to follow unprofitable tangents as far as they will lead. Then again, in the title role, Michael Stuhlbarg gives a titanic performance that crowns his career to date. It's a tough piece, one that demands you wrestle with it."
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"Instantly one of the very best in a season unusually blessed with top-drawer entries...Hughes is hotly on his game here...As for Stuhlbarg, his performance of Socrates’s death is one of the most convincingly memorable as any experienced on a stage in some time. Maybe ever...Nelson depicts a democratic state as often contentious, as frequently at risk of foundering, as a political cauldron. In other words, he’s set out to unleash a play for our time—and succeeded.”
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