Escape
2012

"Mosakowski's comedy occasionally ventures into dark territory but ably makes her point about the hilarious extremes that people will endure before attempting a getaway from their absurd and isolated lives. Designer Lauren Helpern's economical set divvies up the space into three convincing homes in a working-class neighborhood, where events play out in simultaneous action.
. . . director Gaye Taylor Upchurch's concise staging weaves the characters in and out of each other's playing areas,
. . . it's all in the service of Mosakowski's delightful comedy."
- Backstage

"You can get dizzy trying to keep track of the comings and goings in "Escape," Susan Mosakowski's comedy about three troubled couples. Performed in spearate, distinct areas of the tiny La MaMa stage, each representing an apartment, it's like an intricate, downtown theater version of " Desparate Housewives."
- New York Post

Instinct
2012

"Maguire skillfully addresses ethical questions, be they specific topics, such as the pros and cons of genetic testing, or broader philosophy, such as how much science can hope to control nature.

The risk Maguire takes is in trying to use the play to discuss conflicts that arise in science, without turning his characters into mouthpieces for those debates.  Over the course of the play, the complexity and depth of the characters becomes apparent, and Maguire throws in a few curve balls to keep them from being predictable.

He might have created his characters in order to discuss larger issues, but Maguire’s finished product does something better: it illustrates those issues with believable human stories. This is what makes the play engrossing and valuable. Scientific studies have shown, and every good writer knows, it is in our human make-up to remember things and empathize with people when we are told a story, more so than when we are given a list of facts. With Mara, Daniel, Lydia and Fermina, Maguire takes advantage of that instinct."
- CultureLab, Calla Cofield, January 17, 2012

Wax Wings
2011

A World Apart
2011

“Thoughtful and earnest, this play is a small but neat success.”
- nytheatre.com

“ . . . there’s a great deal of tenderness and lyricism in Susan Mosakowski’s script. . . . Under Jean Randich’s sensitive direction, the supporting cast renders both the ascetic and laical words in multiple, and deeply human, dimensions.”
- Show Business Weekly

“It’s a serious work with ample humor. Well acted and resonant, A World Apart addresses the human need for authenticity, love, and meaning in our lives. It’s about mindfulness and making conscious choices.”
- Examiner.com

Wild Man
2010

“The wildest thing you’ll do this month is to buy tickets to Wild Man!”
- New York Press, Mark Peikert, January 19, 2010

Man-made
2008

"For sure, Susan Mosakowski's "Man-Made" is a play of ideas . . ."
- The New York Times, Andrea Stevens

"In scenes rich in humor and human insight, Mosakowski artfully raises profound moral and philosophical question about what it means to be human."
- Intermission, Joan Leyden

Abandon
2007

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

Nighttown
2002

“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

Embers
2000

“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

Marching to Union Square
1999

“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

Chaos
1998

“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

Harry and the Cannibals
1998

“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

I Don't Know Who He Was and I Don't Know What He Said
1998

“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

Throwin' Bones
1997

Winner of the America Award for outstanding play of 1997.

LocoFoco
1996

“Mosakowski writes with intelligence and imagination. She has a poet's touch and a sculptural visual sense.”
- The Village Voice
Brian Parks

Phaedra
1995

“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

The Tight Fit
1995

“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

Babel Stories
1990

“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

The Window Man
1994

“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

Cities Out of Print
1990

“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

The Tower
1989

“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

A History of Western Philosophy by W.T. Jones, Vol. III: Wipeout
1989

“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

THE BRIDE/BACHELOR TRILOGY:
The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate
The Bachelor Machine
The Bride and Her Extra-rapid Exposure
1988

“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

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
1987

“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

Propaganda
1987

“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

The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate
1987

“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

Visions of Don Juan
1987

“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

The Bachelor Machine
1986

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

The Bride and Her Extra-rapid Exposure
1986

“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

The Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo
1986

“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.

A History of Western Philosophy by W.T. Jones, Vol. II: Tomorrowland
1986

“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

Berenice
1985

“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

Ice Station Zebra
1985

“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

A History of Western Philosophy by W.T. Jones, Vol. I: Der Inka Von Peru
1984

“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

The American Mysteries
1983

“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

The Commie Stories
1983

“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

Untitled (The Dark Ages Flat Out)
1983

“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

The Confessions of a Dope Fiend
1982

“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

The Inferno
1982

“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

Michi's Blood
1982

“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

Chromatic Spectacles
1981

“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

Circuits
1981

“Tense, motile drama told in sound, light, and precise, bizarre choreography . . . Mosakowski's use of stage mechanics is undeniably brilliant.”
- Soho News
Don Shewey

Walled Garden: (Language)
1981

“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

Bruises
1980

“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

Eye Figure Fiction
1980

“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

Seventy Scenes of Halloween
1980

“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

White/Black
1980

“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

Eclipse
1978

“Exacting, exciting collage of movement and memory . . .”
- Data, Antwerp
Hugo Durieux

Night Coil
1978

“Directorial tour de force . . . entertaining and often disturbing theatre.”
- WBAI
Rick Harris

The Ride Across Lake Constance
1977

“Excellent.”
- WBAI
Rick Harris

The Seven Deadly Elements
1977

“Imaginative, accurate, and perfectly disconcerting.”
- Artforum
Deborah Perlberg