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Playwright John Pielmeier has “some big, gore-soaked shoes to fill,” said Paul Hodgins in the Orange County, Calif., Register. The 1973 film version of The Exorcist, about the satanic possession of a child, rose to iconic status on a mix of “sex, violence, projectile vomiting, and religious desecration.” Yet a stage version requires more than special effects to succeed, which must be why Pielmeier’s script adheres closer to the 1971 novel, shifting the focus from horror to “issues of guilt, faith, and the rocky path to redemption.” The result, alas, is a story that’s both “relatively bloodless” and downright absurd in its pretentiousness. Early on, a priest speaks this line: “For anyone who doubts the existence of the devil as I once did, I have three words. Auschwitz. Cambodia. Somalia.” Not only does the sentiment underscore the obvious; it’s in questionable taste to drag real-world horror into a pulpy fright fest.
We can’t hold the actors responsible for Pielmeier’s “diabolically stilted dialogue,” said Charles McNulty in the Los Angeles Times. But while Emily Yetter provides a “tender and otherworldly” performance as the tormented girl, most of the cast fails to transcend the material. Brooke Shields, playing the child’s mother, “lends her lines a B-movie obviousness that cries out” for “the mystical skills of an acting coach.” It’s a shame that such failures squander the “frightening elegance of the stagecraft” of Scott Pask’s “strikingly original scenic design.” A new Exorcist could have been “a devilishly good time.”
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If/Thenfeature Tony-winning Idina Menzel “looks and sounds sensational” in a role tailored to her talents.
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Rocky
feature It’s a wonder that this Rocky ever reaches the top of the steps.
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Love and Information
feature Leave it to Caryl Churchill to create a play that “so ingeniously mirrors our age of the splintered attention span.”
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The Bridges of Madison County
feature Jason Robert Brown’s “richly melodic” score is “one of Broadway’s best in the last decade.”
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Outside Mullingar
feature John Patrick Shanley’s “charmer of a play” isn’t for cynics.
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The Night Alive
feature Conor McPherson “has a singular gift for making the ordinary glow with an extra dimension.”
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No Man’s Land
feature The futility of all conversation has been, paradoxically, the subject of “some of the best dialogue ever written.”
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The Commons of Pensacola
feature Stage and screen actress Amanda Peet's playwriting debut is a “witty and affecting” domestic drama.