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Evocative art, video, music, dance, structured improvisation – all that is available for your delectation in Matthew Maguire’s narrative collage play Abandon. In this beautiful and jarring exploration of male-female relationships, the audience is constantly challenged to participate non-traditionally in an unforgettable theatrical experience. For his direction of Abandon, the judges have voted an Obie to MATTHEW MAGUIRE.
- The Village Voice, 2007 OBIE Committee
The performers—Alexis McGuinness, Genevieve Odabe, Victoire Charles, Michael Ryan, Jeff Barry, and Richard Prioleau—all turn in dazzling performances. They exhibit exceptional control over their bodies and work together as if they grew up in the same household. Writer-director Matthew Maguire leads them with precision and elegance.
Particularly striking is his mixture of individual movement and group movement with multiple focal points. He creates a gorgeous collage of bodies in motion. The elements of this production come together to make something truly remarkable, for its delicious execution and its rich, sweet sense of beauty.
- nytheatre.com
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“Mosakowski’s conceit is neat . . . Strong performances . . .
Maguire and Ryan add a vital third dimension . . . ”
- Time Out NY, David Cote
“Evocative.”
- The Village Voice, Jessica Winter
“It’s impossible to see the current production
without thinking again and again of Beckett in general and Waiting for Godot.
Beckett’s “Gogo” and “Didi” . . . playing out
poignant, borderline comic exchanges similar to the word games Mosakowski
has devised for “Leo” and “Joyce.” . . . Deftly performed
by Matthew Maguire and Michael Ryan.”
- The Irish Echo, Joseph Hurley
“Covering the gamut from sadness to joy, anger to
forgiveness, and infused with both humor and tragedy, Nighttown has an overall
poetic quality. Mosakowski has orchestrated the proceedings with warmth and
skill.”
- The Irish Voice, Diana Barth
“. . . enraged denial of identity that comes at the beginning of Susan
Mosakowski’s strange and fascinating new play, Nighttown, is thrown
in the face of the man who desperately wants to become James Joyce . . . Sensitive
acting enriches this 80-minute production . . .”
- Backstage, Dan Isaac
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“As the old man in Samuel Beckett’s Embers sits at his kitchen
table reminiscing, the sea washes over him until he’s barely discernible;
a tiny figure fading into an endless, rolling ocean … Maguire eloquently
embodies this stranded soul, lost between old age and the vexing questions
of his boyhood, animating Beckett’s terse poetics. The piece’s
mysteries never resolve, but Caroline Nastro’s production creates a
mesmerizing cocoon of consciousness.”
- The Village Voice, Francine Russo
Village Voice’s 2000/2001 Season Highlights
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“Long before Zeckendorf Towers and Toys “R” Us edged its
landscape, Union Square was the stomping ground of trade unionists, social
reformers, and activists of every stripe. The Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
and Cornell University’s Special Projects for Unions celebrated this history
recently, with Marching to Union Square, a performance piece based on speeches,
newspaper accounts, and diaries from the 1800’s. If the cast’s britches and
boaters looked like the past, its spirit of struggle and solidarity was as
fresh as the paint on a picket sign.”
- The Village Voice
Lynn Yeager
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“Chaos finds all sorts of visual and sonic analogues
to the chaos theory being pursued by its hero and heroine, in an opera that
romanticizes science as successfully as any work since Einstein on the Beach
… It uses an irresistible vocabulary: fractals, strange attractors, and the
“butterfly effect,” which posits that, as Matthew Maguire’s libretto puts
it, “a butterfly’s wing in Beijing can magnify till it sets a Kansas cyclone
spiraling . . . Avant-garde opera has struggled to find scenarios that make
sense in the context of what current musicians and designers envision. Chaos
finds that connection . . . Its patterns add up brilliantly.”
- The New York Times
Jon Pareles
“It’s eye-opening to pull apart the layers and see the foundation of
wonderful words.”
- New York Times Magazine
Jack Rosenthal
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“All this transplanting (and there's more) sets up the plot for Harry
and the Cannibals, Susan Mosakowski's pleasant absurdist one-act play.
- The New York Times
Anita Gates
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“Maguire dips and swoops with a take-no prisoners non-logic that is a tour
de force.” 1998 Obie Award for Acting to Matthew Maguire.
- The Village Voice
Francine Russo
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Winner of the America Award for outstanding play of 1997.
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“Mosakowski writes with intelligence and imagination.
She has a poet's touch and a sculptural visual sense.”
- The Village Voice
Brian Parks
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“Now the writer and director, Susan Mosakowski . . . has
decided to detonate the genre that gave us The Iceman Cometh and Kennedy's
Children. The result is a wittily staged, peppery slice of absurdism called
The Tight Fit.”
- The New York Times
Ben Brantley
“Mosakowski's The Tight Fit a Large Scale Revelation.”
“Mosakowski's design, complete with a large wall behind the action and a complex
light setup, is a work of art in itself.”
- The Los Angeles Times
Robert Koehler
“Susan Mosakowski, co-founder with Matthew Maguire of the
visually startling and brainy Creation Company, brings her newest piece to
the East Coast from its open-air debut in California.”
- The Village Voice
Choices
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“What better accompaniment for crimes of passion than cool jazz—restless,
scatty, crackling with impulsive decisions. The Window Man anatomizes a very
current brand of murder, and the moody jazz score provided by Bruce Barthol
and Greg Pliska drenches us in a smoky 50’s basement club sweat. Based on
the 1982 bias bashing of an Asian-American teenager by an unemployed auto
worker in Detroit, it feels like a black and white B-picture, hard-boiled
and unforgiving.”
- New York Newsday
Jan Stuart
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“Maguire is a magician. His pieces combine verbal brilliance and eerie, physical
beauty. Look for Zen ease and apocalyptic explosiveness.”
- The Village Voice
Laurie Stone
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“In the lively and amusing one-hour play, Ms. Mosakowski
and Matthew Maguire portray a couple so entranced by legendary figures who
have died in car crashes—James Dean, Grace Kelly, Albert Camus, Jackson Pollock,
and many others—that they work themselves into an ecstatic, suicidal frenzy
of fantasized identification..”
- The New York Times
Stephen Holden
“. . . a man and woman on a dirt-patch with auto landscape,
on which they act out the lives of the dead and famous . . . This is wickedly
funny conceit—and well played . . .”
- LA Weekly
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“The Tower is really very beautiful and very powerful. The Babel metaphor,
the use of the biblical text, the brick-baking, the interweaving of locations
and political events, and most especially the writing, which is extraordinary—well
I found the whole thing upsetting, moving, funny, and frightening, often for
reasons that remain unclear to me (which is uncanny but often the best kind
of reaction one can have to art, I think). … The last paragraph of Ruth’s
final speech is really, really stunning. The piece is permeated with the mysterious
energies of that heady, word-crazy Kabbalist type of Judaism … it reminded
me of Edmund Jabès’s Book of Questions—digging into the dark, apocalyptic
side of Hebraic theology.”
- Tony Kushner
“Maguire navigates from Ruth’s mind to a newscast from the Intifada, to something
else again, with tremendous fluidity. Thematic connections are embodied, rather
than suggested, and so the Tower—a recurring and central image in the characters’
thoughts—seesaws between hope and despair … The doctors articulate the turns
of phrases racing through Ruth’s mind in song as they perform surgery on her,
turning her tropes into minuets. Specific words unlock associated meanings,
one image unleashes another, driving the next scene into an entirely different
realm and making the churning thoughts and language a kind of centrifuge for
the whole piece.”
- Yale Theater
Tom Sellar
“The Tower addresses the loss of Paradise, its recovery, and human relationships
to the divine. Maguire assembles his own Tower of Babel out of language that
is political, rich in human insight, and beautifully poetic.”
- Theatre Communications Group
Play Source
Peter Burton
“Maguire’s treatment did not just translate the Tower myth;
it restored it with fresh insight.”
- High Performance
Kent Neely
“Maguire’s best writing yet.”
- The Village Voice
Alisa Solomon
From the Son of Semele Ensemble’s 2004 Los Angeles premiere:
“Fascinating and challenging”. . . as it “layers elements
of Joseph Chaikin, Pina Bausch, and William S. Burroughs to build an allegorical
Babel-rouser of post-Internet import.”
- The Los Angeles Times
David Nicholls
“Maguire toys with language, phrases repeated and their sense altered with
the shift of a word or two. And the Tower of Babel is, of course, a symbol
of shattered meanings. In the shards lies Maguire’s view of the modern world,
of the human prison, of sense dangling off the bricks as though in a painting
by Dalí.”
- LA Weekly
Steven Leigh Morris
“Maguire’s words are the driving force . . . and the profound nature of this
layered work will not soon be forgotten by anyone who experiences it.”
- Backstage West
Jeff Favre
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“For the last several years, Jeffrey Jones has been wandering the shores
of popular culture, gathering images of heroism and love . . . From the flotsam
and jetsam of William Prescott adventure tales and Harlequin romances (Der
Inka von Peru) or H-Bomb descriptions and 1950’s games shows (Tomorrowland),
Jones has fashioned a hilarious way to reveal the self-serving myths through
which we understand the past. Wipeout, which completes his trilogy—A History
of Western Philosophy by W.T. Jones—gets literal about myth: Here, Jones looks
at 1960’s beach movies through Greek and Roman lenses . . . What distinguishes
Jones most from the usual postmod (juxta)posers is his skill as a playwright.
He mixes the two contrapuntal worlds so fluidly that it seems natural for
Socrates to wander among the surfers, or for “the girl-next-door” to end up
among the gods. In the final scene you can no longer tell Beach Party Bingo
from Plautus.”
- The Village Voice
Alisa Solomon
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“Mosakowski's theater has grand sweep. Her visually provocative
Bride/Bachelor Trilogy . . . is a theater piece one “reads” like a painting
. . . wit, incisiveness hit a peak in the last of the trilogy.”
- Minneapolis Star and Tribune
Mike Steele
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“As a stage show, Caligari bypassed the quaint distancing
of the original's by-now hoary film modes to drive the true horror home.”
- Artforum
John Howell
“Visually, it is absorbing. A sort of Dali-inspired hallucination of
multi-level platforms with nooks for bedrooms and coffins and dominated by
a revolving disc with a hypnotic eyeball center.”
- The Daily News
Don Nelsen
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“Maguire is mining a rich metaphoric lode and his image of mental totalitarianism,
of combat in the inner landscape, is fascinating.”
- Minneapolis Star and Tribune
Mike Steele
“This iconoclastic playwright and director is accustomed to risk . . . Maguire
is an erudite American, writing from a sophisticated point of view about our
society as it is and will be. It is an urbane, personal vision, not lacking
in metaphysics … It is also a vision obsessed with experimenting with theatre’s
power to persuade and recreate reality for the audience. Now, in his latest
play, Propaganda, Maguire analyzes communication and the political use of
language by governments, and presents their misuse as the deadliest of sins.”
- Twin Cities Reader
C.L. Thrale
“The electronic music by Fred Frith is superb.”
- The Seattle Times
Paul de Barros
“The play is outrageous with never a whine of self-pity, sly in its digs
at current and future Jacobean societies, swiftly paced, turbulent but comprehensible,
ponderable but never ponderous, and genuinely witty.”
- Seattle Gay News
Ivan Martinson
“Maguire is a real artist. Propaganda is an exhilarating frappe of science
fiction, political paranoia, and revenge melodrama . . . Anyone who can create
a visual spectacle as eye-filling and emotion-satisfying as the balletic finale
of Propaganda doesn’t need mere consecutive words to communicate his meaning.”
- Seattle Weekly
Roger Downey
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“Part magic show, part mixed-media collage, part art-history
meditation, Susan Mosakowski's Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate is a delightful,
spinning contraption of a play chock full of wittily surreal images and propelled
by Vito Ricci's elegant, snappy electronic score.”
- The New York Times
Stephen Holden
“A surreal dream of a play, Rotary creates powerful
and beautifully performed images of seduction asal ear.”
- The Village Voice
Wendy Gimbel
“Susan Mosakowski's The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate is a theatrical
collage, a striking series of images that dance dreamlike through the imagination.”
- The Daily News
Don Nelsen
“Duchamp's Large Glass cut through time as well as space through syntactic
eruptions. The Diller-Scofidio kinetic set did the same.”
- Artforum
Patricia C. Phillips
“. . . the stage piece is witty and puckish.”
- New York Newsday
Allan Wallach
“Rotary Notary is a stunning feast for the eye . . .”
- Downtown
“Rotary Notary is a delightful, gloriously spinning look at how people
define their worlds—communicated not through plot but through stunning visual
imagery, key dollops of text, music, movement, and playful but metaphorically
powerful set pieces.”
- Minneapolis Star and Tribune
Mike Steele
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“An ambitious theatrical collage of erotic obsession . . . Jim Clayburgh’s
shallow motel-façade set provided one of the most resonant images of the festival.
Behind each of the motel’s windows appeared a huge, pristine white bed in
almost vertical position. The windows and beds not only provided nicely framed
spaces for Don Juan to romp with his male and female conquests—a portrait
series of Don Juan at play—the angle of the beds and their antiseptic blankness
also suggested those of a hospital room. At the play’s conclusion, Don Juan
was dragged not to hell but to one of these beds—chained down to the place
of his former pleasure while his old conquests laugh and dance. A striking
visual metaphor of the perils of contemporary sensuality.”
- American Theatre
Michael Cadden
“. . . a truthful Visions of Don Juan, the best moment of which was Elvira’s
gently tearing the scroll listing Juan’s conquests.”
- The Village Voice
Leighton Kerner
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The Bachelor Machine is a fascinating video piece beautifully photographed
in color by Victor Prokopov and set to lively music by Vito Ricci. Challenging
and thought provoking, it offers a fitting tribute to Duchamp.”
- St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch
Robert Collins
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“Surrealistic jump-cut action, along with Vito Ricci's minimalist music,
creates a mesmerizing, flickering rhythm . . .”
The Village Voice
- Robert Massa
“. . . utterly fascinating and beautiful, punctuated deftly by Vito
Ricci's resonant, emotional, synthesizer-generated musical score.”
- Minneapolis Star and Tribune
Mike Steele
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“Jeffrey M. Jones is examining the social reality of post-war America from
a surreal, media-wise point of view. Unafraid of feeling, armed with his talent,
he is meeting the world head-on.”
- The New York Times
Stephen Holden
“Movies, TV game shows, advertisements, H-bomb descriptions, the Fuchs
spy trial, Korean War reports, and McCarthy's charges of communism in the
State Department are the found objects from which Jones sculpts his ominous
image of American anxiety.”
- The Village Voice
Allisa Solomon
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“My purposes were always of the mind,” claims Egaeus,
the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s Berenice. The same could be said of Matthew
Maguire’s theatre pieces. After examining memory in The Memory Theatre of
Giulio Camillo, he has turned to that most mysterious—and dramatic—of mental
activities, obsession.”
- The Village Voice
Alisa Solomon
Lithograph of Poe: Dorothea
Tanning
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“Her vision is multi-leveled: a sophisticated sense of design integrates
a mobile set of sliding walls, backroom scenes and finger-snapping, bebop
choreography to create busy, tightly-directed, eye theatre . . .”
- High Performance
Roberto Gautier
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“Moment to moment the dialogue is packed with witty contrasts
and sleight of hand transformations. Prescott’s lush chronicle, The Conquest
of Peru, sets off the melodrama of the Harlequin hospital romance; Romeo and
Juliet suddenly become Cecily and Gwendolyn. Jones’s direction and design
bring out the best in his elegant writing. The whole is wry, fun, and refreshingly
eccentric.”
- The Village Voice
Robert Massa
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“Careens towards some outer space of the mind where fact and fiction explode
in waves of pure emotion . . . it’s a bold journey . . . Maguire sets the
stage spinning with new ideas and extravagant conceits.”
- The Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
“The American Mysteries is a collage constructed by Creation Production Company.
Director Matthew Maguire juxtaposes media. Film and live performances are
intercut, and the collaborators include writers, architects, and composers.
The end result is like a Rauschenberg combine, unexpected media carry messages
we might overlook in another form . . . The American Mysteries is a search,
and the answer it comes up with is not the simple one that the detective genre
usually requires. Rather it addresses the American dream and uncovers the
violent core that fuels it.”
- Other Stages
Amy Virshup
“It’s a fascinating blend—an old fashioned thriller melodrama mixed with
ritual theatre, fashioned with a smattering of political satire, and presented
in a setting that is both abstractly complex and elemental. The ensemble performances
are superb . . . The American Mysteries is one of the most interesting experimental
works to be seen in a long time.”
- St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch
David Hawley
“The imagery and the acting—which the nine member cast pulls off with great
virtuosity—is very precise and clear, never random and indulgent. The visual
sensations and the formal qualities of the piece work beautifully with the
simple language of the text and the emotions of the moment. We find ourselves
dealing with ideas and experiencing the visual and emotional at once in a
collage of various meanings that seduce us sensually and expand our perceptions
at the same time. It’s fascinating work.”
- Minneapolis Star and Tribune
Mike Steele
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“Its energy, combined with Creation's mastery of the basic performance multimedia
vocabulary, gave its best moments the pregnant clarity of a classic dream.”
- Artforum
John Howell
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“A brain-cracking aesthetic monologue delivered over Ricci’s melodious electronic
music, energetic, precise, and brainy . . . consistently intriguing. Untitled
gives a good look at Creation’s ambitious performance concepts.”
- Soho News
John Howell
“Thrilling, as if one were touching the private thoughts of the writer .
. . the hallucinogenic effect that emanates from the telescopic structure
is heightened by the musical score . . . Untitled is ingenious in its construction
and excitingly performed.”
- de Volkskrant, Amsterdam
Renska Heddma
“This performance proved itself to be an intoxicating invitation to the
audience to surrender their capacity for logical thinking. Whoever followed
had a blast of fun.”
- Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin
Hellmut Kotschenreuther
“Enlightening, maverick, antic, and obstinately original performance.”
- The Baltimore Sun
Sarah Fenno Lord
“A constant flow of activity, imagery, and narrative that plays on the senses
and must be experienced.”
- The Philadelphia Inquirer
Douglas Keating
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“Fascinating . . . ingenious . . . imaginatively expansive . . . This experimental
work takes off from the confessional monologue of a drug addict who tries
to rationalize a causal connection between drugs and art. Ron Vawter plays
the narcissistic fellow with authority and a great deal of humor, his knowing
eyes and self-mocking smiles offering sharp and funny comments on the man
and his quest. Michael Harris makes a marvelous Mephistophelean guide as he
urges the would-be artist to live out the connections between his own addictive
appetites and the Faustian quest for greatness. His impersonation of Helen
of Troy is one hilarious inducement . . . Jones and Maguire certainly keep
us enthralled.”
- The New York Post
Marilyn Stasio
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“Michi's Blood, which is now receiving its New York premiere, is
the work of a playwright whose singular vision cannot be ignored. Mr. Kroetz,
a leading figure in Germany’s avant-garde, is a chronicler of the modern industrial
state’s lowest, least articulate underclass, and he writes about these people
with a spare, if violent, realism that is microscopic in its intimacy . .
. a good introduction to his striking style . . . vigorously directed by Mark
Lutwak.”
- The New York Times
Frank Rich
“Disturbing, ravaging spectacle … virtually without flaw.”
- The East Village Eye
Bethany Haye
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“The saturated night painted with fluorescent color. Beautiful.”
- The Berliner Morgenpost
Peter Hans Göpfert
“Lots of abstract visual sleight-of-hand—light, color, shifting objects and
planes—keep this intriguing spectacle continually absorbing . . .”
- Alive
John Howell
“Elegant black and white geometry.”
- The Village Voice
Ann Sargent Wooster
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“Tense, motile drama told in sound, light, and precise, bizarre choreography
. . . Mosakowski's use of stage mechanics is undeniably brilliant.”
- Soho News
Don Shewey
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“Bennett Theissen has directed a play written in 1973 (but never staged)
by Richard Foreman, whose plays had heretofore been considered “unstageable”
by directors other than himself. Under his direction there is a surprising
lyricism in the work . . . His cast—with English actress Karla Barker as Rhoda—works
in a more animated, somewhat naturalistic style that often brings to it a
dance-like plasticity . . . there is a freshness here.”
- Other Stages
Renfreu Neff
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“Bruises operates beautifully in the playwright’s setting of sharp, bright
light, dissonant, repetitious music, and surreal miniatures of apartment buildings
remembered from childhood past . . . Charles Borkhuis employs the language
of the poet-playwright to show the agony of his characters’ struggle, and
he uses leaps of poetry to juxtapose the street language of the present with
the misty images of the past. And his choice of a punk/futuristic setting
goes completely against the grain, against the heart of the problem his characters
are dealing with, and this has much to do with the play’s success: no matter
what time or place you live in, the desire for personal recognition remains
the same. As Gregory’s 6’10” frame swaggers around the stage, as Shawn leaps
from pillar to post, as the photographer conjures up frenetic images from
his DJ past, they all seem to be saying one thing: Tell me I am loved.”
- Grove Press
Claudia Menza
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“A work which sets out to delineate new boundaries for a new theatre . .
. a visual and aural fusillade . . . imaginative, enigmatic, distinctive work.”
- Performing Arts Journal
Gautam Dasgupta
“Matthew Maguire’s Eye Figure Fiction is a brilliantly choreographed, vitally
performed, visually stunning, theatrical collage. True experimentation in
the theatre is rare. Maguire’s Eye Figure Fiction stretches the limits of
dramatic form.”
- WBAI
Rick Harris
“Stimulating, dense theatrical collage . . . a million things happen at
once.”
- Soho News
Bethany Haye
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“It is All Hallow’s Eve; mysterious forces are abroad and within. Two unacknowledged
guests, a Witch and a Beast, gradually insinuate themselves into the tight
emotional world Jeff and Joan have constructed. Even the house, as built (down
to the last crack in a windowpane) and lit by Jim Clayburgh, becomes a loomingly
ominous creature. Fantasy intrudes and takes over and finally it is reality
that seems to be the intruder . . . Unlike most plays, 70 Scenes does not
seem to be taking place in time at all, but in space. It is as if each scene
were a discrete sketch traced onto the thinnest of translucent paper, and
then all 70 of the tracings were juxtaposed one on top of the other to create
a complex, multi-layered drawing in which the total image was deep and singular
and memorable.”
- The Village Voice
Roderick Mason Faber
“This contemporary “portrait of a marriage” is intriguing, funny, and theatrical
. . . Superbly natural performances by Christopher McCann and Frederikke Meister
. . . Jim Clayburgh, the Wooster Group’s designer, did the wonderful set .
. . Thoroughly exquisite.”
- Soho News
Don Shewey
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“Visually fantastic throughout . . . the piece represents theatrically the
four dimensions known to physics using a color progression.”
- Soho News
Don Shewey
“This way lies madness.”
- Other Stages
Tish Dace
“. . . always fascinating to watch . . . ”
- Baltimore News American
Carol Herwig
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“Exacting, exciting collage of movement and memory . . .”
- Data, Antwerp
Hugo Durieux
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“Directorial tour de force . . . entertaining and often disturbing theatre.”
- WBAI
Rick Harris
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“Excellent.”
- WBAI
Rick Harris
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“Imaginative, accurate, and perfectly disconcerting.”
- Artforum
Deborah Perlberg
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“Not on or below but actually within the Brooklyn Bridge,
a deftly imaginative exploration has been taking place . . . The scenes are
handled with such poise and are so vivid to behold that one begins to feel
the shards of a dispersed past trying to reassemble themselves.”
- The New York Times
Bernard Holland
“This beautiful, visually startling play about the perils
of forgetting covers the life and times of the now obscure Hermetic philosopher
Giulio Camillo (1480-1544) . . . While actual 16th century philosophers used
free association to fix the external, material world, Maguire’s Camillo is
moved to use it the way a post-Freudian does: to bring to consciousness what
a part of him already knows. The weaving of these two historical perspectives
is brilliantly accomplished.”
- The Village Voice
Laurie Stone
“The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo came to vivid theatrical
life as a deconstructed mystery play . . . Maguire’s Camillo pushes his “scientific”
demonstrations of memory beyond rational thought into an area of dreamlike
visions . . . with Vito Ricci’s compelling and evocative score played live.”
- Artforum
John Howell
“Vito Ricci hauls his synthesizers and string instruments
on a hotdog pushcart, accompanying the action with rich Gregorian punk.”
- The Village Voice
Alisa Solomon
“Maguire’s reconstruction of the theatre is blessed by his
extraordinary cast of four which includes Michael Ryan as the philosopher,
David Alton as Alessandro Citolini, Michele Elliman as Zerbinetta della Mirandolo,
and Karla Barker as Beatrice Ficino.”
- BBC/Arts Extra
Ann Sargent Wooster
“A dramatic antidote for historical amnesia … The Memory
Theatre is as much about repressing memory as memory itself … Maguire has
created a complex theatre. The vivid costumes, lighting, and Ricci's eerie
syntho-Gregorian music produce a near-hallucinatory effect on the spectator.
Seven unique sets (separately installed by five artists and four architects)
combine with the calculated staging of the actors and the architectural use
of the space itself to form a memorable visual language all its own.”
- The Guardian
Stacey Asip
“In the Anchorage’s main vault two wood beams thrust out
from opposing walls, forming an interrupted bridge . . . Designed by architects
Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, the structure cut through the space
with calculated precision, such that the room seemed on the verge of shattering.
Diller and Scofidio create in their work the sense of a suspended moment before
something snaps . . . Few other architects comment so accurately and tragically
on contemporary life.”
- Artforum
Patricia Phillips
“The Memory Theatre ingeniously exploits the special qualities
of the Anchorage . . . a shining example of theatre and architecture in aesthetic
partnership.”
- The Christian Science Monitor
David Sterritt
“Magical . . . enveloping . . . intriguing . . . disturbing
. . . dazzling . . . stunningly provocative.”
- St. Paul Pioneer Press Dispatch
David Hawley
The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo is one of the densest,
richest, most provocatively beautiful theatre events in my memory . . . A
counterpoint to Giulio’s increasingly illusionary “pure” memory system is
a troupe of commedia players, vulgar, brash, obscene, enacting scenes that
play on people’s greatest fears—embarrassment, oppression, castration, death.
The troupe’s central character, Pantalone, the absurd buffoon and object of
these feared actions, is played by the same actor who plays Giulio Camillo
and thus becomes his alter ego. Michael Ryan gives an amazingly forceful,
incisive, and penetrating performance in the dual role.”
- Minneapolis Star and Tribune
Mike Steele
“The Brooklyn Bridge has long inspired dreams and fantasies.
But for sheer exotic color and ambition, few of those dreams could match The
Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo.”
- The New York Times
Jennifer Dunning
Winner of 1986 Bessie Award for the full ten-member New York design team.
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“Events in Dante's journey move just a little faster
than the mind can fully register or comprehend. Images stay in your consciousness
from the preceding scenes giving you the feeling of viscerally joining Dante
on his headlong journey through man's most dizzying nightmare, Hell.”
- The Villager
Steven Hart
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“Mr. Maguire had the smart, viable idea to explore
desire as a verb in eternal, fruitless search of an object.”
- The New York Times
Ben Brantley
“Maguire’s adaptation of Phaedra cleverly recasts
Racine’s neo-classical meditation on desire and the ways in which excess—the
logic of conquest and possession—ruptures order and becomes its own politics
and psychology . . . Maguire turns Racine’s court into a family of CEO’s,
a den of mergers and acquisitions, boardroom manipulations, and backroom deals
. . . Maguire writes with a highly stylized sense of this realm. The dialogue
alternates between television-like flatness—the sordid banalities of the rich
and evil—and dream languages with soaring heights of myth and eroticism: Dynasty
meets Marguerite Duras.”
- Tom Sellar
Yale Theater
"This is playwright-actor-director Matthew Maguire's
take on Racine – hip, hilarious, beautifully written, and heavily combustible
– presented in a Bay Area premiere by Last Planet Theatre, a bold company
in the very nice habit of introducing Bay Area audiences to some of the best
but inexplicably overlooked modern drama. Maguire's version of the Hippolytus
myth follows the currents of desire through lines of incest, money, and power
in the devastating vacuity of American dreaming … Unconscionable corporate
power, dynastic succession, the rivalry of father and son, the waste-laying
greed and lust of the powerful—when it’s not oozing from the front page, the
traditions of Greek tragedy are reliably upheld by the sober columns of the
business section. Accordingly, Last Planet Theatre’s production of Phaedra
bypasses the usual flirtation with antiquity to embrace the full-blooded modernist
nightmare of American playwright Matthew Maguire. In Maguire’s contemporary
rendering of the Hippolytus myth, enough sex and power to make Henry Kissinger
blush are running rampant through the labyrinthine mansion of a ruthless corporate
mogul, whose second wife has fallen desperately in love with his bastard son
and heir. Even without reference to Euripides—or that hefty line of playwrights
subsequently drawn to the story of the lustful stepmother—one assumes it will
not end well. But Maguire’s modernist treatment (a response to Racine’s classic
version, in fact) brings out much that is unexpected too, vibrantly and compellingly
refashioning the tragedy for a capitalist age."
- San Francisco Bay Guardian
Robert Avila
"The trophy horse of other adaptations, Maguire’s
Phaedra is swift (yet pervasive), violent (but not gratuitous), and
physically compelling. If Phaedra was music, it would be jazz … The
whole is a sleek machine that slows only to revel in its own masterfully modern
poetic language."
- New Theater Corps
Aaron Riccio