"Fans of Mr. Silver’s angry wit and whimsy may feel he is missing in action in this portrait of a misbegotten marriage...The production has been directed with as much smoothness as the script allows by his frequent and fruitful collaborator, Mark Brokaw...'This Day Forward' feels unfulfilled, like a skeleton in search of animating flesh...The cast members are all perfectly fine. But an implicit and wistful question hangs over them: Is that all there is?"
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"There will be a horrid, selfish mother; her children will grow into unhappy adults; their dad is dead or dying. Those criteria are dutifully met in the acid-penned playwright’s new black comedy...Such a bad beginning will never lead to a happy family, an obvious conclusion that Silver doesn’t do much to deepen or challenge after intermission. Mom never loved Dad, and 46 years later, everyone’s sad. That’s the short version of 'Forward,' which ranks at the bottom half of Silver’s output."
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"This dry hump of a comedy, with affectations of tragedy stapled in, got me to laugh, or rather snort, only once...Its people are just ordinarily crazy, not fantastically so. And ordinarily crazy people are no fun. Nor can they be very tragic, if you hate them — as I defy you not to do. Despite the laborious efforts of the cast, working under the direction of Silver’s longtime collaborator Mark Brokaw, they are unable to enlist the audience in any kind of sympathy."
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"Playwright Nicky Silver can milk a story of a monster mother like nobody’s business. He and director Mark Brokaw did exactly that to near-perfection a couple years back in 'The Lyons.' They’re not at the top of their game in this latest far more uneven and less successful effort that’s bipolar in tone...Not much here that moves the conversation or the comedy forward."
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"The play does start off surprisingly, with a first act that resembles the sort of strained farcical comedies that populated Broadway in the 1950s...But little about the proceedings feels fresh, and...the brittle dialogue and thin characterizations aren't very funny or interesting. Everything in the sluggishly paced play feels attenuated and drawn with overly broad strokes...The performers try mightily but are largely unable to overcome the schematic nature of their characters."
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"'This Day Forward' has many of the great hallmarks of Silver's canon...Yet the play never stops feeling like a second-to-last draft, one with a few great surprising scenes and a handful of predictable ones that are still a bit rough around the edges...Director Mark Brokaw does what he can to guide the company into performances that are more cohesive than the text, but no one pushes the comedy or the drama far enough to stand out."
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"The team of playwright Nicky Silver and director Mark Brokaw display an impressive talent for packaging complex family drama as hip, off-beat comedy before getting to the guts of the long-term effects of dysfunctionality...‘While This Day Forward’ can certainly use a bit of punching up dramatically, and at its present state seems to require a bit of padding to fill out its two acts, the solid work of Brokow's ensemble keeps interest from sagging."
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"The problem with this kind of comedy is the falseness of the premise…As the starting point for a family saga spanning five decades, it's dead in the water…That Brokaw's direction never finds its comic footing may not be his fault, given the insubstantial material he has to work with. Still, the cast does its best…There's little comedy, because the characters don't behave like recognizable human beings. And there's not much tragedy, because there isn't anything for them to lose."
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