Absolution
Opening Night: September 8, 2010
Closing: October 3, 2010
Theater: 59E59 Theaters
From Perrier Award nominated Owen O’Neill comes a truly startling story. Timely and topical, O’Neill weaves a grim and riveting tale of a man who has taken upon himself the sins of so many and unleashed on them a terrible vengeance
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September 15, 2010
“When we were deep into the orchard, I threw McClennan on his back, ripped his trousers and shorts off, slit them with the knife,” the man before us says without a flicker of emotion. With this arresting opening image, the solo play “Absolution,” at the 59E59 Theaters, establishes its grim, horrific tone. It’s hard to imagine that the next words out of the narrator’s mouth will be something like, “And then we had a spot of tea.”
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 13, 2010
Owen O’Neill is a magnetic performer. He has skill, and patience and precision of thought and movement. Everything that would make him not only an excellent actor but a dandy serial killer. Let us give thanks that he has chosen the stage instead of the slaughter.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 13, 2010
Rarely, if ever, has listening to a man describe his life’s work as he gets dressed been as horrifyingly entertaining as it is in "Absolution," writer-actor Owen O’Neill’s one-man play currently running at 59E59 Theaters as part of the First Irish Theatre Festival. That’s because the man in question is a serial killer who specializes in bringing to justice priests who prey on children. Over the course of 70 unnerving minutes, O’Neill relates in grisly but fascinating detail how his character has killed four monstrous clergymen, making us his confessors and, to some degree, his accomplices. It is a measure of the play’s subversive success and O’Neill’s inherent likability that we root for this man, who is unnamed until the very end, even as we are appalled by his violence.
READ THE REVIEWSeptember 17, 2010
With all of the regurgitated fare on the big screen and on Broadway these days, storytellers should take an example of originality and pertinence from Absolution, the acclaimed 2008 Edinburgh Fringe hit making its U.S. premiere this fall during the 1st Irish Theatre Festival. Written and performed by Owen O’Neill, and directed by Rachel O’Riordan, Absolution walks a tightrope between what is revenge and what is justice without mincing words.
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