Prurience NYC Reviews and Tickets

"A tricky, mutable, overstuffed performance piece...A few too many forms and subjects...It felt usefully uncomfortable to listen to real people sharing their own stories and a lot more comfortable and less useful to hear actors recite monologues. The actors’ content was more extreme — borderline prurient — but the form was a lot safer, the messaging obvious...A more daring piece might have explored compulsion and control and, yes, lascivious trepidation, without using actors at all."
Read more

"The structure and illusion doesn't always hold. It's not that the subject matter is uncomfortable. It's that the presentation of it is awkward and annoying in its lack of truth. The sad punch line is that no one gets any help. In that way there is no drama. Only emotional presentation. There are confessions but no conclusions. Like a bad overlong sketch with no ending in sight the session quickly devolves into an overlong, overlapping, extremely grating shouting match."
Read more

"Christopher Green's sly self-help satire...It's a neat spoof of support groups – those cults of lukewarm psychobabble...What, Green makes you ask, is genuine here? What's constructed? 'Prurience' plays with that and if, at first, the glitch from participatory event to scripted play feels like a let-down, it proves far more slippery and self-aware...A deeply uncertain and unsettling experience; one that gets right to the core of contemporary life."
Read more

"A disorientating, provocative experience...It’s also funny and shrewd, throwing up questions about the commodification of everything from sex to depression, and exploring the blurred boundaries between fantasy, performance, and reality...While the issues of consumption and alienation are familiar, theatrically the piece is audacious...At times I longed to flee, yet this is the kind of art that leaves its mark on you. Unnerving, and uncomfortably compelling."
Read more

"It’s often very funny and genuinely discomforting, largely because the dramaturgy is much sharper and tighter. It immediately solves the crucial central problem of so much immersive theatre in justifying our presence in the piece...'Prurience' doesn’t entirely succeed in keeping all the balls in the air, but at its fiendish, exhilarating best it makes you question not just attitudes to porn but how we experience reality."
Read more

"A clever and discomforting exploration of consumption – compulsive and conscious – in late stage capitalism...It also contains an immaculate coup de theatre, in which layers of illusion are built up and pared back before a big reveal...What appears at first to be an insensitive, albeit entertaining, parody of therapy and addiction becomes something richer as levels of distortion and audience expectations are subtly managed."
Read more

"What pushes this beyond zeitgeisty navel-gazing, aside from the metafictional games, is that Green levels his critique just as much at therapy itself...He’s to be admired for tackling this painfully taboo subject. That ‘Prurience’ doesn’t cohere into anything with clear conclusions might be its greatest strength–for me, it made for half-complete theatre. But if you’re in two minds about buying a ticket and joining the group, I suggest you do."
Read more

“Green plays this character incredibly well…The really outstanding thing with this piece is the structure, and the piece being so immersive really lends itself to what Green is setting out to achieve..Green also makes some beautiful points about conscious consumption, the abundance of pornography and the access and availability to it...The points, however, feel slightly rushed within the piece overall, as the structure demands so much of your attention.”
Read more