"Over its compact 75 minutes, the play by Rita Kalnejais, lands with a modest impact as it pulls off a sly feat. It feels both very familiar and disarmingly fresh."
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“ 'This Beautiful Future,' an ambitious play that doesn’t succeed in balancing its seesawing styles and tones, keeps springing bewildering surprises."
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"Only the most determined will walk away from 'This Beautiful Future' having felt nothing."
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When trouble finally comes for Elodie and Otto, Kalnejais drags it out unconscionably, scrambling the time frame for sledgehammer ironies. The most obvious of these is the finale, depicting a false dawn complete with a live baby chick onstage as a risible symbol of soon-to-be-shattered hopes. The trouble is, we're way ahead of Elodie and Otto; by the time they describe their sad fates in dueling monologues, we have already imagined them.
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"Rather than being lulled into the fictional world, I became hyper aware of my own lost youth...As an added bonus, 'This Beautiful Future' concludes with a coup de théâtre that can crack the shell of the most hardened curmudgeonly New Yorker."
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If you like your W.W. II history unadulterated, you may object to a love story between a French teenage girl and a 16-year-old Nazi soldier even if they are inexperienced and innocent and unaware of what is to come. The fact that they are both hopeful of life in the future in the middle of war and devastation notwithstanding, were people ever this naïve and unworldly? While This Beautiful Future is tastefully presented, it does not deal with the moral issues that the play hints at but refuses to recognize.
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"At a swift eighty minutes, there are scenes of beauty in 'This Beautiful Future'. It’s a shame that some of them are circumvented by some misguided detours along the way."
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"I left This Beautiful Future scratching my head. The play has received rave reviews in its several incarnations, yet it left me flat."
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