"If you're not a Charles Dickens or a Jane Austen or a Brontë sister, where is your place? It's a weighty question, and the answers inevitably dig up complex issues of racial and social hierarchies. Under Sarah Norris's direction, however, the production is stumbling a bit too much alongside its characters to offer a coherent perspective...As in any work of fiction aiming to become a great novel, ideas need more nourishment to fly off the page."
Read more

“’The Great Novel’ reveals itself in the first few minutes without having anything additional to say...Norris' direction doesn't add any urgency...but her cast seizes such opportunities as they are given...Overall, this is an uncertain and rather mild treatment of a potentially incendiary subject. It doesn't shy away from clichés, either...’The Great Novel’ is neither sufficiently dynamic for drama nor cutting enough for real satire...It doesn't really know which direction it wants to take.”
Read more

“It’s an enervating 95 minute mashup of lesser Ionesco with helpings of Wes Anderson and the visual style of John Singer Sargent...'The Great Novel' is a non-realistic exercise that does have a heartfelt quality but from its opening moments to its fantastical finale it never coheres into a satisfying play. It’s an amiable endurance test...A work that is perhaps only comprehensible to its author as most anyone else is likely to find it to be cryptically pointless."
Read more

"Small or no budget theatre often creates amazing, pure work. But the vast majority of these Off-Off Broadway productions operate under not-so-ideal conditions and sometimes the limitations of a truncated budget and abbreviated rehearsal period, mixed with blossoming experience, can lead to half-baked work. This is the case of 'The Great Novel'...But through its stumbles, we witness the creative missteps of a young, healthy and growing theatre company."
Read more

"A conventional play…gussied up with unnecessary, pseudo-absurdist distractions. These provide an artistic gloss that does little to elevate its style or substance…Perhaps to pump some blood into this rather anemic tale, director Norris has the actors play everything in a heightened style that attempts to comment on their characters but that results in what could most politely be called overacting…Just as disturbing is the choice to have the multiethnic cast wear partial whiteface makeup."
Read more

"'The Great Novel' fashions a witty, delightful exploration of art and identity...Puts all of those characters in whiteface, even if an actor is already white. The whiteface makeup recalls a masquerade mask around the eyes and nose, an appropriate metaphor for both the assumption of identity and the lenses through which people see art and self, as well as each through the other...Smart, lively, and entertaining, 'The Great Novel' is a great time."
Read more