Evelyn Brown (A Diary) NYC Reviews and Tickets
Show-Score Member Reviews (3)
See it if Fitting for the incubator of experimental theatre; 70 min of repetitive words & movements, just like the diary owner’s repetitive life.
Don't see it if You want an uplifting show or a concrete plot or anything fun. I was there to support the 2 actors, but tried hard not to fall asleep.
See it if you want to see theater artists respecting (with immediacy) an important writer’s investigative storytelling that challenges and illuminates
Don't see it if if you don’t want to honestly face the startling impacts that a life of servitude has on people, in work that’s powerfully like serial music
See it if Acting,stage design&choreo-all work seamlessly.Based on the diary of a N Englander household servant of the early XXc, Maria Fornes created*
Don't see it if There's no story here; there's a solid structure.Repetitive?Yes,so is the gem Godot but PLS don't go if udon't like unconventional theater. Read more
Critic Reviews (4)
While the painstaking entry upon entry yearn to be something of import, we can’t help but feel it takes a certain steadfastness and desperate commitment to make the banal seem so extraordinary. This is where the brilliant attack of performance by Ms. Lauren as Evelyn, and Violeta Picayo as Evelyn Brown, come into play. Ms. Picayo can be thought of as the younger Evelyn, but the fact is they are both the same person usually on the stage at the same time, experiencing the same ennui. Ms. Lauren is the human map of a sometime wordless exploration of isolation. We are witnesses to every one of her emotions as it makes its way across her face and into her beaten down yet stalwart physical life. Ms. Picayo sometimes has that innocent wide-eyed wonder that gets her through to the end of a scene, making us pity her for her stiff upper lip and beatific smile in the face of a life not well-lived.
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"Evelyn’s diary also portrays a social world of visits and letters and deaths. In Fornés’s hands, 'Evelyn Brown' was an observer of rather than a participant in that broader community."
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"From a historical and dramaturgical perspective, 'Evelyn Brown (A Diary)' is a masterful experiment, a rich text that, thanks to Alker, Reagan, and their team, can be not only studied, but also experienced...While this may in some ways be an academic exercise, it is nonetheless, like Evelyn Brown’s diary itself, a vital piece of theatrical record."
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"If, like me, you attend the theatre looking for drama, the spectacle of ideas and personalities in conflict, you will want to approach 'Evelyn Brown (A Diary)' with caution. Even at sixty-five minutes, I found my patience occasionally stretched thin. And yet, days later, I can't get 'Evelyn' out of my mind."
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