AmericanTheaterWeb Original News & Reviews

AmericanTheaterWeb

Review: Why Torture Is Wrong, and The People Who Love Them
Terrorist Plot Paranoia Gleefully Skewered

New York Times

Panties, Squirrels and Lots of Ammo
Christopher Durang’s new work is a hilarious and disturbing comedy about all-American violence.

New York Daily News

'Torture' whips up the laughs
Off-kilter is par for the course for Christopher Durang, whose semisuccessful new comedy trots out various Looney Toon types as it seeks to subvert and crack you up.

New York Post

Much right with 'Wrong'
Christopher Durang's new play, about the domestic War on Terror, starts off all wobbly. The humor is mustily banal: A Republican named Leonard (Richard Poe) rants about "freedom toast" and Jane Fonda; his wife, Luella (Kristine Nielsen), is prone to dreamy non sequiturs about "Wicked" and Tom Stoppard. A disembodied...

Hartford Courant

'Torture' A Wacky Descent Into Lunacy
Playwright Christopher Durang returns with a topical, tangled and funny play titled "Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them," which opened Monday at The Public Theater.

Associated Press

Playwright Christopher Durang comically tackles the insanity of fear
Does anyone go to Hooters for the food? ... It's one of the many cosmic questions to ponder while watching "Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them," playwright Christopher Durang's latest exercise in supreme nuttiness.

Variety

Review: Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them
...But while Durang hits his mark in the familiar territory of domestic dysfunction, his political wit is less incisive, yielding a comedy of diminishing returns.

Back Stage

Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them reviewed by Adam R. Perlman [critic's pick]
Christopher Durang refuses to grow up. For the American theatre, this is a very good thing.

TheaterMania

Review: Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People who Love Them
Christopher Durang wrests humor from horror in this smartly acted, directed, and designed satire about a young woman's spur-of-the-moment marriage.

Talkin' Broadway

Review: Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them
Let’s talk about Kristine Nielsen. Not because she’s a vital part of Christopher Durang’s new play at The Public Theater’s Newman Theater, Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, but because she isn’t. . .

nytheatre.com

Review: Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them
Christopher Durang's new comedy, just opened at The Public Theatre, is very much a play for this particular historical moment

CurtainUp

Review: Why Torture Is Wrong, and The People Who Love Them
If there is one quality that distinguishes Durang's comically barbed diatribes against society, it comes from a kind of guileless sophistication that is almost child-like