Praise for The Permanent Way
Wow. Wow. A couple of reviews are in for The Permanent Way, and they are AWESOME!!
Here's Time Out Chicago:
A critic who reviewed the 2003 premiere of The Permanent Way at the National Theatre in London couldn’t recall when he had left a theatre “in such a state of pure fury.” It’s likely many other Britons felt the same way, reliving the shock of railway crashes between 1997 and 2002 that were, more or less, precipitated by the privatization and subsequent malfeasant management of British rail service in the early 1990s. Or at least that is what David Hare posits in his elegant, enraged play, which begs this question even more: Why perform a play indicting Tony Blair’s Britain in the U.S., and why now?
New Leaf’s production, the first on this side of the Atlantic, answers when a mother whose son perished in a 1999 crash notes that “you lose your shoes” when you fly through a railcar window. The play initially lobs so many facts, figures and findings at the audience that we felt compelled to scribble notes like a frantic college freshman. Ray tries to animate this barrage-culled by Hare from interviews with everyone from bureaucrats to the bereaved-with sometimes-awkward ensemble choreography, but The Permanent Way strikes hardest when the words of these real-life characters do the work. Their indignation, despair and anger are haunting, especially seen in the exquisite detail Dana Black gives the Bereaved Mother. Hare transforms insistent, dense documentary theater into an excavation of human grief caused by forces beyond our control-and that is something we all can rage about.
-Megan Powell
Even awesome-er, here's the Chicago Reader:
David Hare's 2003 docudrama examines the privatization of the British rail system and its literally disastrous aftermath. But Hare's artful oral-history collage resonates beyond the dysfunctional particulars of Blairism, or even callous crisis management from 9/11 to Katrina. It's a universal model of how calamitous projects high (the war in Iraq) and low (our own CTA) are created by policies designed to fail, navigated by profit-driven managers unaccountable to reality and protected after the fact by "investigatory" commissions.
Credit director Brandon Ray and his uniformly superb cast for making this intellectually searing material utterly immediate - technically and emotionally, the characterizations in this New Leaf Theatre production are the match of anything you'd see at Steppenwolf or the Goodman.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
- Brian Nemtusak
Woohoo! In other news, Cheryl's leg is slowly recovering, but she's not going to be able to do the show this weekend. So yours truly is back on the job. It's actually a lot of fun, but I'm hoping Cheryl can come and take her role back for good next weekend. She really deserves to partake of the glory-basking that we're all doing right now.
Here's Time Out Chicago:
A critic who reviewed the 2003 premiere of The Permanent Way at the National Theatre in London couldn’t recall when he had left a theatre “in such a state of pure fury.” It’s likely many other Britons felt the same way, reliving the shock of railway crashes between 1997 and 2002 that were, more or less, precipitated by the privatization and subsequent malfeasant management of British rail service in the early 1990s. Or at least that is what David Hare posits in his elegant, enraged play, which begs this question even more: Why perform a play indicting Tony Blair’s Britain in the U.S., and why now?
New Leaf’s production, the first on this side of the Atlantic, answers when a mother whose son perished in a 1999 crash notes that “you lose your shoes” when you fly through a railcar window. The play initially lobs so many facts, figures and findings at the audience that we felt compelled to scribble notes like a frantic college freshman. Ray tries to animate this barrage-culled by Hare from interviews with everyone from bureaucrats to the bereaved-with sometimes-awkward ensemble choreography, but The Permanent Way strikes hardest when the words of these real-life characters do the work. Their indignation, despair and anger are haunting, especially seen in the exquisite detail Dana Black gives the Bereaved Mother. Hare transforms insistent, dense documentary theater into an excavation of human grief caused by forces beyond our control-and that is something we all can rage about.
-Megan Powell
Even awesome-er, here's the Chicago Reader:
David Hare's 2003 docudrama examines the privatization of the British rail system and its literally disastrous aftermath. But Hare's artful oral-history collage resonates beyond the dysfunctional particulars of Blairism, or even callous crisis management from 9/11 to Katrina. It's a universal model of how calamitous projects high (the war in Iraq) and low (our own CTA) are created by policies designed to fail, navigated by profit-driven managers unaccountable to reality and protected after the fact by "investigatory" commissions.
Credit director Brandon Ray and his uniformly superb cast for making this intellectually searing material utterly immediate - technically and emotionally, the characterizations in this New Leaf Theatre production are the match of anything you'd see at Steppenwolf or the Goodman.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
- Brian Nemtusak
Woohoo! In other news, Cheryl's leg is slowly recovering, but she's not going to be able to do the show this weekend. So yours truly is back on the job. It's actually a lot of fun, but I'm hoping Cheryl can come and take her role back for good next weekend. She really deserves to partake of the glory-basking that we're all doing right now.