The Thin Place NYC Reviews and Tickets

78%

(116 Reviews)

Positive

83%

Mixed

15%

Negative

Members say

Absorbing, Great acting, Thought-provoking, Slow, Clever

About the Show

Playwright Lucas Hnath returns returns to Playwrights Horizons with a story about a friendship between two women—one who’s recently experienced a strange loss, and another who communicates with the dead.

From the show:

Everyone who ever died is still here, just in a different part of here. Linda can communicate with them. And if you believe, she can make you hear them, too — in the thin place, the fragile boundary between our world and the other one. With acuity and relentless curiosity, Lucas Hnath’s play transforms the theater into an intimate séance, crafting an unnerving testament to the power of the mind, which has a mind of its own.

Member Reviews (116)

Overrated, Slow, Fluffy, Funny

See it if While the show has at certain points some humor, a good story, it is to wordy and slow at points. Needs rework.

Don't see it if Like Hillary and Clinton, hnath throws up a stinker. Show goes to another needless place 60 minutes in.

Thought-provoking, Resonant, Mysterious, Challenging, Absorbing

See it if “You believe what you want to believe.” Other people’s belief systems can feel phony and unsettling. Maybe because our own isn’t solid.

Don't see it if You won’t enjoy a “real” psychic’s relationship with a “fake” psychic as a metaphor for deeper conflict between people’s beliefs & egos. Read more

Critic Reviews (18)

CRITIC’S PICK. "Death Is a Two-Way Door in ‘The Thin Place’: Lucas Hnath’s cunning new ghost story, about a psychic and her client, is a twisty yarn that won’t unravel."
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4/5 Stars. "For most of its 90 or so minutes, Hnath’s perceptive play suggests a cross between David Mamet’s 'The Shawl'...and Wallace Shawn’s 'Aunt Dan and Lemon'...But the final part...plunges us into different waters. We emerge, shaken, with a heightened sense of the darkness around us and of how much of the world we fill in for ourselves."
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"Lucas Hnath’s 'The Thin Place' Is a Horror Drama that You Think You’ll Forget, Then Won’t"
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"The new experimental drama by 'A Doll's House, Part 2' and 'Hillary and Clinton' playwright Lucas Hnath concerns the fateful friendship between a young woman who's recently experienced a loss and a professional medium."
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"The writer of 'A Doll’s House, Part 2' tells a ghost story wrapped in an existential enigma."
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"'The Thin Place' is a welcome return of Hnath the creepy fabulist, the haunted magician who revels in the uncanny and liminal."
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"'The Thin Place' Plays Scary Games With Your Suspension of Disbelief: Lucas Hnath's new play debunks communication with the afterlife…or does it?"
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"Ever since seeing it, I've been going back and forth: 'Is The Thin Place' a serious consideration of the immaterial? Or an expertly designed spookhouse? I can't say. Then again, I'm still thinking about."
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"'The Thin Place,' then, does work up into an effective ghost story, after lolling around relating this anecdote or that political viewpoint or this rift in two women bonding. But what else is Hnath trying to tell us? Not, from all evidence, much."
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3/5 Stars. "It almost seems like Hnath challenged himself to see just how minimalist a play he could devise. As one who has greatly admired the playwright's past works, I regret the inclination to consider The Thin Place something more like The Thin Play."
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3/5 Stars. "The kookily sincere 90-minute phantasmadrama is intriguing, somewhat amusing, and succeeds in its tricky outlandishness. It also aims for a profundity that it never quite achieves."
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Score: 88%. "Hnath and director Les Waters have created something like a pas de deux. Matching pacing and movement from moment to moment. What they have created releases what has been set to paper and lets it fly - creating a new 'Thin Place' where there was none before."
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"A thin play… I suspect the point of Hnath's play is, like Linda's séances, to create a mood - a ghost story/horror story meant to keep the audience on edge…I was not scared or moved or provoked, although I was certainly uncertain, and occasionally completely in the dark."
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"‘The Thin Place,’ despite a relatively plotless format and a few red herrings…, is continually engrossing, thanks, in part, to Waters’ tonally adept direction. Credit as well its excellent cast. Both McAndrews and Sandoval…provide reality-based oddness, while Danson and McDonnell are magnetic."
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"Audiences looking for an involving 90 minutes will be more than satisfied by this play; while those seeking a larger, deeply philosophical examination of psychic phenomena -- or the existence of the so-called "thin place" between our reality and the other world -- will at the very least have cause for debate."
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"The ambiguities, revelations and evasions are nebulous enough to keep many possibilities open. Hnath employs diversion in the way that [Ricky] Jay and all great magicians do. Eventually the story veers almost imperceptibly into obsession/"
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A Theasy Best Bet. "As each character shares a story, the audience must reconsider earlier revelations and reconcile what they're heard with what they're seeing. The effect is at times creepy, but also comedic, making theater that will stay with you long after the lights go out."
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