Everyone's Fine with Virginia Woolf NYC Reviews and Tickets

“A take-no-prisoners approach to satire...Theatergoers acquainted with Albee’s play will savor this production’s dizzy echo chamber of words and visuals...Those unacquainted with the play’s literary arcana can sit back and watch the cast riff jazzily on Scelsa’s punch-drunk dialogue...If 'Everyone’s Fine' is partly a rebuke to what male playwrights do to their female characters, it also bubbles with a love of theater at its most brazenly theatrical that Albee would surely recognize."
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"Less a deconstruction than a demolition derby...For roughly the first quarter of its 70-minute running time, the play is very funny...Scelsa’s writing is witty, the adept actors deliver amusing cartoons, and Collins’s staging features clever metatheatrical sight and sound gags. But zany parodic energy is hard to sustain, and 'Everyone’s Fine with Virginia Woolf' slips into repetition...The play is provocative, but where does all this send-up and takedown leave us?”
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“The gags come flying fast and furious but few of them land...Barely sustains its comic energy through its brief running time. Despite impressively committed performances from the ensemble, the piece ultimately feels like a Carol Burnett sketch with intellectual pretensions...The comic riffs seem random...There's no faulting the ensemble...But their efforts go for naught in this ill-conceived twist on a classic that already cleverly comments on itself.”
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“A mass deposit of theatrical allusions and styles, postmodern textual strategies and pop trivia...Scelsa’s script is a glitter bomb of meta spoofery and nested references...As ‘Everyone’s Fine’ spins into a second and third act, it grows increasingly fragmented and weird...John Collins’ springy, athletic staging lands each hyper-literate joke while not stinting on the sight gags...Scelsa shows you can love Edward Albee, while giving him a good hard spank over your knee."
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“Scelsa's witty, trenchant parody of Albee's play packs a thesis-worth of critique on the way men perceive and portray skewed images of women through the distorted lens of the American patriarchy...At its best when it's riffing on Albee's work, rather than concocting its own scenes...The humor tends to subside in those moments, but otherwise, director John Collins does a terrific job of creating a parodic Albee universe.”
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“It's not just the general absence of wit, although the parade of sophomoric semi-jokes makes for some notably heavy going. Collins' production relies on crude bits of staging...Any five minutes of Albee's play are funnier than the totality of ‘Everyone's Fine With Virginia Woolf’...Substandard performances...Has but one point to make, which it does with thudding repetition...Plays like a SNL sketch that has unaccountably been allowed to fill the entire time slot.”
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“Were Albee alive today, he likely wouldn’t be so fine with this send-up of his play. Rightly so…What Scelsa has in mind to do with her 75-minute insult is fairly clear. While declaring in a program note that she greatly admires the work—with admirers like these, Albee doesn’t need detractors—she does quarrel with some of its elements… Whatever Scelsa is doing, it isn’t humorous. This is true of all the loudmouth carryings-on that director John Collins does nothing to discourage.”
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“An incoherent, amateurish, arguably homophobic slog…By the middle of this play little is making sense…Scelca’s preferred device for critiquing Albee, in this proudly feminist reclaiming, is to critique him for being a gay man writing about women by caricaturing other gay men writing about women…Sex-obsessed sophomoric romp through literary allusions, providing occasional entertainment but no insight.”
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