"This two-hander is an engaging play, one that stirs the imagination...The adult fairy tale is completely original as merges reality and fantasy in surreal settings...Tunde Skovran and Julia Ubrankovics excel in their demanding roles as they master both the dialogue and the action of the show's enthralling scenes...'Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale' is an inventive show that challenges ideas about people's backgrounds and lifestyles. It is truly an unforgettable production."
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“Watching ‘Toys' is like attending an exhibit of abstract expressionism and trying to make heads or tails out of what you are seeing. Cryptic, bewildering, absurd, nightmarish...'Toys’ is unusual, to say the least, opaque in its delivery but nevertheless packed with meaning, like a particularly dense poem...You will either shrink away in bafflement, or take up the challenge to piece together the scattered remains of this convoluted jigsaw puzzle of a play.”
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“Hilarity and menace converge in Romanian-born playwright Stanescu’s absorbing and mysterious theater piece...Skovran as Shari and Ubrankovics as Clara are sensational...Stanescu’s dialogue is a heady mixture of Ionesco-style absurdism and fierce realism that sustains her intriguing work that takes the familiar framework of depicting political oppression into a fascinating dimension...Though brief in length, ‘Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale’ is stimulating, provocative, and memorable.”
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"This staging of Stanescu's play is less about the story than about recreating a feeling of loneliness and disembodiment...I would be interested to see a production of 'Toys' that combines Stanescu's poetry and humor with less frenetic movement...It seems indulgent to direct a single actor to place, say, fifty plastic baby dolls in a checkerboard pattern while the audience watches. However, our patience is rewarded with powerful images that stick with you afterward."
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“A piece that demands attention, but confuses as much as it enlightens...Director Tompa’s go-for-broke creation is meandering and disturbing as much as it is thoughtful...As theatre, it left me with lots of think about, but not engaged enough to try too hard...More time is needed than the 65-minutes given, that is if you are still interested in the end to do the reconstruction with the hope the finished images will be meaningful.”
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“However much this loose narrative seems to make sense of a sort on the page, regardless of the many huge expositional gaps it exposes, in performance it often becomes indecipherable. That's because…director Gábor Tompa…has given it a radically theatricalized, non-realistic, surrealistic, avant-garde staging that diminishes whatever it's saying by drawing attention away from content to style…This isn't to say some won't find the production and its subject engrossing.”
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"Skovran and Ubrankovics are fantastic as the two women. Every time they have a scene together we are captivated by their battles. We are yearning to be part of their journey. It’s when the linear narratives are broken down by more experimental scenes that interest gets a bit muddled. There are some truly perplexing moments, but most of them either are longer than they need to be...Despite this hiccup, 'Toys: A Dark Fairy Tale' delivers a strong and powerful tale."
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"The crisply rendered and steadfastly unabashed atmosphere of ambiguity...Demands close attention – but it doesn’t necessarily depend on you absolutely understanding what is going on...Tompa brings a taut intellectual ferocity to the piece...Stanescu’s storytelling is intentionally disjointed...Performances are compelling, if inscrutable by design...A fascinatingly complex and not entirely comprehensible drama that actually leaves some vivid impressions for a long time after."
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