"This approach highlights the variability within the play itself and sometimes speaks to its internal tensions. But the intellectual playfulness pretty well negates the sense of drama, much less tragedy. The play only makes sense if inexorable passions, conscious and unconscious, drive these characters. Target Margin’s cooler method renders much of the action merely silly, a risk even in straightforward productions."
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"You can see why the director, David Herskovits, elects to speed things up—this impressionistic hundred-minute “study” leaps among the trilogy’s high points. Even the small-plate version has longueurs, though: for every revelatory choice—multiplying portraits of the doomed family patriarch; a death-haunted score—there’s a sequence that hasn’t found its feet. But in its best moments the piece conjures strange revenants from a still unquiet past."
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"With its abbreviated text and acting that's freighted with postmodernist irony, 'Drunken with What' neither tells the whole Mannon saga nor sounds much like the groundbreaking work for which O'Neill is noted…Despite the efforts of such game performers, 'Drunken with What' fails to provide a sense of the cumulative power of O'Neill's magnum opus or the complexity of the Mannons...'Drunken with What' is a worthwhile stab at blowing the dust off a classic."
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