AmericanTheaterWeb Original News & Reviews

Updates for January 30, 2009

New York Daily News

Off-Broadway offers revivals of the fittest
How the mighty have fallen. That's a recurring thought as Brian Friel's funny-sad 1979 play "Aristocrats" tracks the decline of the O'Donnells.

Time Out New York

Review: Aristocrats
Irish Rep stages Brian Friel's Chekhovian drama about a family's dwindling fortunes.

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New York Times

An Irish Home Littered With Corpses, Living and Dead
Brian Friel’s elegiac play is being given a first-rate revival by the Irish Repertory Theater.

Associated Press

A Once-Great Family Faces Decline in 'Aristocrats'
The electrical wiring is woefully outdated, there are no more servants, and croquet must be played with invisible equipment -- but strains of Chopin still pervade the enormous house and grounds of decaying Ballybeg Hall in 1970s County Donegal, Ireland.

Variety

Review: Aristocrats
...Charlotte Moore assembles a dream cast to play the members of this diminished clan, gathered here at the bedside of their dying patriarch to wring their hands over their proud lost heritage and to illustrate Friel's belief in the healing power of storytelling to take a family, a village, a nation through troubled times.

Back Stage

Aristocrats reviwed by Andy Propst
Stories about once-wealthy families and the homes and land they can no longer support are ubiquitous on New York's stages these days.

TheaterMania

Review: Aristocrats
The Irish Rep presents an extremely uneven production of Brian Friel's Chekhovian drama about an Irish family in the 1970s.

Talkin' Broadway

Review: Aristocrats
Does the upper crust ever do anything but decay? So many plays are obsessed not with who the rich are but instead who they were that you can often predict a new one - or an unfamiliar old one - merely by applying your knowledge of another member of the genre. Of the two significant problems with the Irish Repertory Theatre’s otherwise

CurtainUp

CurtainUp

Review: Aristocrats
As staged by the Irish Rep Brian Friel's Chekhovian play is given the intimacy it deserves.