Middletown
Opening Night: November 3, 2010
Closing: November 21, 2010
Theater: Vineyard Theatre
Middletown is a deeply moving and funny new play exploring the universe of a small American town. As a friendship develops between longtime resident John Dodge and new arrival Mary Swanson, the lives of the inhabitants of Middletown intersect in strange and poignant ways in a journey that takes them from the local library to outer space and points between.
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November 3, 2010
The strange beauty of life and its sometimes unbearable weight are both considered with a screwball lyricism in Will Eno’s new play “Middletown,” which opened Wednesday night at the Vineyard Theater in a pitch-perfect production directed by Ken Rus Schmoll. In this delicate, moving and wry amble along the collective road to nowhere, the folks are friendly, and the view of star-dappled skies and modest homes is familiar and comforting.
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November 3, 2010
Middles of every variety are irresistible petri dishes for the absurd. Middle America, middling lives, “the middle distance” (a phrase Edward Albee lip-smackingly macerated in his latest, Me Myself & I): Nothing beckons the Beckettian like the gaping promise of empty space. (Luckily, it’s still this nation’s top export.) The suspension of a body, or a country, or a cosmos, between two poles that are themselves increasingly obscure and abstract and arbitrary, the closer one looks at them — that’s a gleaming beacon for the pomo wanderer. So it’s no surprise that Will Eno, author of the celebrated shoegazer monologue Thom Pain (based on nothing), has pitched his tent in the vast, empty American Middle.
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November 3, 2010
Will Eno seems determined to subdue his minimalist impulses in "Middletown," a provocative but egregiously overwritten piece about life and death and the monumental struggle to get through the day without killing yourself. Something of a postmodern cut-and-paste job on "Our Town," this surreal fantasy of daily life in a small town allows residents to step out from behind their ordinary persona and assert their individuality in the eccentric idiom that the scribe perfected in Off Broadway hit "Thom Pain (Based on Nothing)." A fine idea, if only Eno hadn’t focused his play on the two dullest citizens in town.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 3, 2010
Some people will find "Middletown" to be a beautiful — perhaps even a profound — study in human existence. Others may well dismiss Will Eno’s latest drama as just so much obvious, overwritten bosh.
READ THE REVIEWNovember 3, 2010
More than likely the title of Will Eno’s new play will bring to mind Thornton Wilder’s classic story of a small town. It follows that the character known only as Cop who shares the above quoted capsule description of Middletown with us, is Eno’s version of the Town Manager.
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