Any news or insights on "THE OTHER PLACE" at the Shed?
#2
Posted: 2/4/26 at 7:10pm
I enjoyed this. Tobias Menzies and Emma D'arcy are extraordinary with strong performances from the supporting cast. Grounded, natural acting where the tension builds throughout. If you liked Oedipus, this has a similar feel but on a smaller, more intimate scale.
#3
Posted: 2/5/26 at 11:59am
Thanks for the encouraging review, looking forward to seeing it next week. (Ex NYer-coming in for five days with the wife and seeing four plays (two of them are this and Oedipus).
#4
Posted: 2/5/26 at 12:55pm
Oedipus closes on Sunday
#5
Posted: 2/12/26 at 3:47am
Isherwood is mixed to positive in the Wall Street Journal.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-other-place-review-greek-roots-naturalistic-surface-fa64e3b9?mod=itp_wsj
“The Other Place,” like its enigmatic title (what is this other place, exactly?), is an oblique play that shies away from overtly elucidating the themes that simmer beneath its mundane naturalism: how a family death can warp lives in ways that lead to further damage, and whether it is possible to escape from emotional wounds endured at an early age. This elliptical approach is in part its strength, subtly illuminating how trying to move past one tragedy may bring a family to the precipice of another. (In this, the play does echo the cascading calamities that are the hallmark of ancient Greek drama.)
Still, it never attains the sense of impending horror—or the emotional power—of a classical tragedy (I remained dry-eyed throughout). Perhaps that is Mr. Zeldin’s manner of underscoring how the contemporary world, despite endlessly proliferating “healing” practices, cannot ameliorate the prevalence of despair and suffering, preferring to ignore, patronize or stigmatize those who must endure it.
#6
"OK, so it feels thin. As a director, Zeldin excels at working with designers (here, the set and costume designer Rosanna Vize and the lighting designer James Farncombe) to make an evocative space, a container for alienation and fear. As a writer, though, Zeldin has only two modes: downbeat naturalism (“what is he going to do … like go and stand there on his own and just scatter dad in a bush”); and bald indications that Things Are Bad (“Are you unwell again?”). Zeldin’s script lacks patience, so, after about an hour of bickering, it smash-cuts into the awful stuff, as though we’re changing channels to another play’s climax.
Posted: 2/12/26 at 4:27am
And Helen Shaw in the New York Times, also mixed to positive.
"If it weren’t for the Sophocles allegory, this 80-minute, speed-run tragedy might feel a little hasty, a little sensationalistic, a little thin.
"That bizarre narrative shift gives Zeldin trouble because shock, paradoxically, robs his play of forward movement. Once we know what’s gone wrong with these people, we just want everyone to go into therapy or, I guess, custody. Zeldin condenses his play so intensely that he seems to lose track of cause and effect. Still clinging to “Antigone,” he expects that he can maintain a tragic balance among his characters, but his own modern setting — and the sordidness of their situation — makes that too difficult."
#7
Posted: 2/12/26 at 9:00am
I caught this yesterday and agree with that snippet from the Times and even moreso with Jackson McHenry’s take from Vulture. The play is thin, I kept waiting to understand what was going on. The actors are all fantastic but their performances don’t cover the vagueness of the material. Their internal backstories are strong enough to carry them through while the audience is left mostly in the dark. I’m not familiar with Antigone so I couldn’t play the match up game to connect some of the dots. And it’s less that I didn’t know what going on and more why it was going on. Emotional outbursts at the end of the play, while skillfully embodied, left me feeling, “now what’s she going on about!?” rather than punching me in the gut.
#8
Posted: 2/12/26 at 9:43am
Jackson McHenry, Vulture
“Zeldin, in your program, insists he intends The Other Place to stand independent of its source. But as in the case of many a work whose name director (who is, as my colleague Sara Holdren has pointed out, usually male) asks the daring question, What if this classic had big glass sliding doors?, it’s impossible to ignore the shadow presence of the original. Characters tend to move around in a set pattern as if being pulled by magnets, which is fine for the ritualistic structure of ancient texts but difficult to buy when a sheen of psychological realism is imposed. Annie’s insistence on proper burial rights — so pressing in the context of Sophocles when Antigone attempts to bury her brother Polynices — doesn’t register with the same weight in a contemporary setting, and it puts us at immediate odds with the character. Why would this itinerant progressive backpacking type care so much about her dad’s ashes, except that she’s a faux-Antigone and we need her to? Grief can grip you with strong, irrational impulses, but because there’s no disrespect for the dead in spreading someone’s ashes in a nice little ceremony, Annie’s objections leave you thinking she is less righteous than petulant. And what was the nature of her father’s death that has made discussion of him so taboo? Perhaps for the sake of universality, Zeldin keeps Adam’s past vague, implying he was a tortured, unstable patriarch, not someone who imploded his family name with a transgression on the scale of Oedipus’s own. It’s the wrong approach. Any version of Antigone needs to be powered by the overwhelming force of something big and dark, as if trying to hold back a reservoir of pain on the scale of the Hoover Dam. Instead, late in the evening, Zeldin gives the family a separate revelation. The luridness of that turn, which made some in the audience around me gasp, is one issue, but it’s more that it unsettles the structure of the piece. We thought were in the shadow of one kind of grief, and it’s usurped by another, more pressing one, with little time to process it. Instead of accumulating force, The Other Place buckles and swerves.“
#9
Posted: 2/12/26 at 10:12am
I thought this was pretty extraordinary. A constantly engaging slow burn. Brilliant acting all around. P.S. Don't sit House Left if possible.
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