Welcome to the mind of Adrienne Kennedy, the poet who refracts all of world history and its attendant cultural artifacts through the prism of the American shame, racism, and the personal agonies it has visited on generations of individuals. Winston Churchill —who is cited in the script as knowing friends of one of Montefiore’s leading citizens — said that winning the war against Hitler would demand “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” Every line of Kennedy’s piece, now being premiered by Theatre for a New Audience at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, is drenched in blood and tears, and toil and sweat are never far from its surface. But unlike Churchill’s war, Kennedy’s unremitting battle against the outrages of the racist past has no happy outcome. The evil persists; human betrayal and destructiveness are irrevocably bound up with human love. – Michael Feingold
We Are Your Robots: Best Theater of 2024 – New York Magazine/Vulture
December 5, 2024
“Ethan Lipton’s outstanding new concert play…sly, smart as heck, and somehow both extremely tender and laugh-out-loud funny…charming tunes and clever