"It's a production that gets a lot of individual elements right, including short dances whose charm lies in their unexpectedness and tangible physicality...The dialogue slips in and out of multiple languages, but the scrolling supertitles are clunky...More troublesome is that the characters are thinly drawn, and what the show is getting at remains elusive. A busy, 60-minute performance, it seems longer because it doesn't invite curiosity or sympathy."
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"Though the piece doesn't consistently cohere as a narrative, it does raise provocative questions about what identity is and how scientific advances might potentially shape an individual's sense of self in alarming ways...Newhard and Shah adroitly portray the twins...Both actors also occasionally break out into songs and dances that comment chorus-like on the action, but these Greek-tragedy-style interludes seem distractingly out of place."
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"The story has some plot holes, but doesn't demand more suspension of disbelief than comparable stories...It's an engaging plot, but not groundbreaking...The show earns its place at HERE by using the story as a vehicle for broader philosophical exploration...Idiosyncratic breakout moments of song, dance, and interaction with recorded voices do feel out of place, but the production is strong enough to support the momentum of the story through these philosophical, aria-like pauses."
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"'Assembled Identity' is a marvelous piece of craft, using all the tools of modern theater in supple and inventive ways...Director/co-creator Kristin Marting integrates found text with original story smoothly, and has done strong work with the actors...But while the ideas underlying the piece are intriguing and important, I often found myself wishing the complexity and richness of the text and the characters lived up to the excellence of the production."
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"The breathtaking and thoughtfully devised mixed-media, genre-bending work is a progenitor of a subject-genre of theatre that doesn’t yet exist...Where the show shines, however, beyond the effortlessly capable performances, is in those moments in the book where what is trying to be communicated is easily understood and feels settled into the moment. A mammoth accomplishment for a production whose literary landscape and expository scope could take days to explain."
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