The Thing With Feathers NYC Reviews and Tickets

"Niziak, who plays Anna, is also 16, and her command of the role is extraordinary—because she is so young, yes, but mainly because she is so entirely at home in her character’s skin...The play fatally falls apart at the end, but Organ keeps us entertained for a good long while before that...The later sections of the play feel contrived in a way that nothing that comes before does; he is determined to let a concept rule the action. The characters, sprung to life, have long since taken over."
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"Onstage Lifetime movie...While the production by director Seth Barrish unfolds with the kind of gasp-inducing, popcorn-shoveling relish that we usually associate with televised guilty pleasures, this play still has some timely things to add to this strange moment in our sexual culture...The play develops at an exceedingly slow boil in the first half as we watch these bland people interact...Whatever the flaws of the production, the subject matter of the play is too interesting to resist."
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"Organ ensnares his characters in a ticking-bomb situation that will leave you in a constant state of tense expectation...Under Barrish's tautly controlled direction, this is a crackerjack psychological thriller, a series of muffled shocks hidden under the surface of everyday life, with each character taking a turn as the aggressor...Organ clearly knows how to sneak up on an audience, trapping us as easily as he entangles his characters in crimes past and present."
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"As social commentary and cultural exposé, 'The Thing with Feathers' is timely and important...It succeeds as an old-style stage thriller and psychological melodrama that incorporates twenty-first century anxieties...In general director Barrish successfully balances the play's contemporary realism and melodramatic flourishes. The play takes some time, unfortunately, to come to a boil...The ending is disappointing. The message seems tacked on and not organic to the play."
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“Though there's a major surprise lurking at the top of the second act, and though it's about how sins of the past can impinge on the present, Scott Organ's ‘The Thing with Feathers’ is ultimately a play without many virtues. Early references to Emily Dickinson and poetry--the title comes from a bastardization of a Dickinson poem--fail to lift the work out of the made-for-TV movie-of-the-week sensibility that keeps bringing it down.”
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"A fantastic cast navigates the script's convoluted relationships...The cast is able to pivot quickly into mixing scary with funny to keep the audience shocked with unexpected twists and turns...The bar is set high in the first act; unfortunately, once the play's secrets are revealed in the second, the surprise and delight diminishes...Despite some disappointing elements, 'Feathers' is the kind of show that can help propel the conversations we need to be having."
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"The playwright Scott Organ very skillfully and incrementally introduces piece by piece of the plot and turns each bit of information on its ear as he adds the next piece. The actors are perfectly cast...The relationships created...are beautifully portrayed and so fully realized that the surprises flow inevitably...This is a very enjoyable evening dealing with unsettling issues. It demands a juicy conversation on the way home."
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“A creepy pleasure…There is something a bit Hitchcock in this work. One fact slides into another until there is a very slow motion pileup on the freeway to happiness…This is one of the many delicious qualities of the writing – days later a person will still be mulling over the events to see how one led into the other…The second act does not fare as well as the first…The plot becomes predictable. Organ does, however, come close to saving it all with a bit of fancy footwork.”
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