There have only been four performances of this show, so I have listed reviews for each one.
Variety
A Royal Court Theater presentation of a play in one act by Christopher Shinn. Directed by James Macdonald.
Kelly - Sian Brooke
Peter, Craig - Andrew Scott
Bad playwrights talk too much. Or, rather, their mouthpieces do. Marvelously articulate, over-explaining characters who expound perfectly expressed thoughts and theories do wonders for collectors of bon mots but little for engaging drama. Mercifully, a dramatist as gifted as Christopher Shinn knows where character is concerned, more than a little self-knowledge is a dangerously uninvolving thing. His characters may think they know what they're doing, but it's their doubts, evasions and lack of self-knowledge that charge up his best writing, nowhere more so than in his achingly compassionate new play "Dying City."
In broad outline, it flirts with any number of second-hand scenarios. Two people meet after a long time, yet it's not a reunion play. There's a plot device about secret letters, but it's not a last-minute-revelation play. On of the characters has died in Iraq, but this is no anti-war tract.
It's nighttime and in the Manhattan apartment she used to share with husband Craig, Kelly (Sian Brooke) is doing a little light packing and watching TV when who should turn up unannounced but Craig's twin brother, Peter. From her furtive responses to his arrival, each of them -- and the audience -- immediately know something is up.
The two of them circle each other, testing the water, in a strikingly tense dance of politeness and prying that sets the almost thriller-like tone. We gradually discover the last time they saw one another was Craig's funeral after he was killed in Iraq. Yet, typically, Shinn initially leaves that military theme hanging.
Instead, focus goes first to the amusingly self-absorbed, vain actor Peter (Andrew Scott), whose current crises range from splitting up with his boyfriend to unfinished business with Kelly. His latest problem, however, is more urgent: He has just this evening walked offstage halfway through his performance in "Long Day's Journey Into Night."
True to Shinn's love of structure, Scott then walks off into the bedroom to make a call, only to return moments later. Except that now he's playing Peter's twin, Craig.
The play subsequently runs along a double time structure, present scenes interleaved with the last night all three of them spent together, the night before Craig left for war.
From here on, engrossing subtext builds to an astonishing degree. Like Harold Pinter's plot-run-backwards masterpiece "Betrayal," this play grips by using time-slips to keep shifting the relationship between what the characters know and what the audience knows.
At its simplest level, this adds tension to Peter's questioning of Kelly's memories of her marriage. We know she's lying because we've been privy to secret scenes of marital discord. At a more profound level, we gradually come to understand how, no matter how much they struggle to tell the truth, all three are lying to themselves.
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The New York Times
THEATER REVIEW; The Walking Wounded Who Never Saw a Battlefield
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: March 5, 2007, Monday
If you're planning to see ''Dying City,'' the crafty and unsettling new play by Christopher Shinn -- and you should -- you need to know one thing, lest you start to question your sanity. The stage moves
Because there will come a moment in the course of this quiet, transfixing tale of grief and violence, set in the shadow of the Iraq war, when you will think: ''Wait a minute. Wasn't the sofa on the other side of the room?'' It was.
Mr. Shinn's latest work, which opened last night at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center under the astute direction of James Macdonald, is propelled by sly and disorienting shifts of perspective. So it is fitting that this process be reflected physically with a platform stage that makes a gradual, complete rotation by the show's end. Not that this play needs it to make your head spin.
Anyone who doubts that Mr. Shinn (''Four,'' ''Where Do We Live'') is among the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today need only experience the creepy, sophisticated welding of form and content that is ''Dying City,'' first produced at the Royal Court Theater in London last year.
A three-character drama performed by a bracing cast of two, Rebecca Brooksher and Pablo Schreiber, this deceptively spare work turns passive aggression into a theatrical dynamic. Not coincidentally the plot's catalyst is a charming actor who could give master classes in being passive aggressive.
Also on the conversational agenda: war, of course, and Peter and Craig's childhood, growing up with an angry father who was a Vietnam veteran; but also television shows (''Law & Order,'' ''The Daily Show''), Peter's changing cast of boyfriends, Kelly's rich parents and William Faulkner (Craig's thesis topic). There's not a word spoken that doesn't feed the idea of the struggle for power among people and how they try to categorize, and implicitly diminish, one another.
Mr. Schreiber, a Tony nominee for the revival of ''Awake and Sing!'' last year, credibly summons both brothers without overdoing the differences or the similarities. But he is absolutely terrific as Peter, a human stealth bomber who disarms with friendliness, then hits his target before you can blink.
Ms. Brooksher, a 2005 graduate of Juilliard, may well be the discovery of the season. A piquant, delicate beauty who brings to mind the aching openness of the pre-''Ally McBeal'' Calista Flockhart and the intensity of the young Shirley Knight, she expertly locates the obtuseness and vulnerability in her character's willful, careful intelligence. Kelly is a natural victim, though Mr. Shinn allows her the spark of hope of finally having realized this.
It could be argued that ''Dying City'' would be even stronger if Mr. Shinn had limited his cast of onstage characters to Kelly and Peter and let Craig emerge by inference. Of the relationships within the triangle, Kelly and Craig's feels the sketchiest, more symbolic than fully lived.
But unlike so many contemporary plays ''Dying City'' raises obvious, important issues in anything but obvious ways. And it knows too well that closure, that ghastly word, is a mass-delusional figment of the American imagination. Kelly talks about the satisfaction of watching ''Law & Order,'' in which ''the mystery of a death is solved and therefore symbolically reversed.'' Mr. Shinn knows that nothing about a death -- or a life, for that matter -- is that easy.
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Same Same
Dying City by Christopher Shinn
+ Location ~ Darlinghurst Theatre Company, 19 Greenknowe Ave, Potts Point, Sydney
+ Date ~ Wednesday 27th June, 8:00pm to Saturday 21st July, 10:00pm
+ Tickets ~ $Presale
“A transfixing tale, See it!” – The New York Times
“Dying City’s the finest new American play I’ve seen in a long while.”—The Observer
After hit seasons at The Royal Court Theatre in London and the Lincoln Center Theater in New York, Dying City makes its way to Sydney for its Australian premiere.
A soldier shoots himself, but why? For his wife, Kelly, and gay twin brother, Peter, politics and the intensely personal collide in this gripping drama.
One evening, Peter, a professional actor, is driven from the theatre, mid performance, by homophobic taunts from a fellow actor. His sudden intrusion on Kelly, at her New York apartment, forces her to face an untidy past, and the truth about her dead husband, Craig.
Baghdad is a dying city but in leading cities throughout the world, acts of emotional terrorism are enacted daily.
“The latest play by one of America’s most probing and provocative playwrights today.” – The New York Times
From the director that brought you the sell out sensations Boston Marriage and Fit To Be Tied comes this exciting production. Starring Saskia Smith from Hedwig and the Angry Inch and Tom Sullivan, soon to be featured in ABC TV’s new drama Rain Shadow.
Featuring Tom Sullivan and Saskia Smith
Director Stephen Colyer
Designer Imogen Ross
Producer Kate Armstrong-Smith
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Broadwayworld.com
New England Premiere of 'Dying City' at Lyric Stage
Dying City
By Christopher Shinn
Directed by Daniel Gidron
Producer, Rebecca Curtiss; Scenic Design, Skip Curtiss; Costume Design, Rachel Padula Shufelt; Lighting Design, Robert Cordella; Production Stage Manager, Kayla G. Sullivan; Assistant Stage Manager, Tiffany Allen
Featuring Jennifer Blood (Kelly) and Chris Thorn (Peter/Craig)
Performances through November 11, 2007 at The Lyric Stage Company of Boston
Box Office 617-585-5678 or www.lyricstage.com
The Lyric Stage Company of Boston boldly soldiers on with the New England premier of Christopher Shinn's Dying City. In this Off-Broadway hit, an Iraq war widow is unexpectedly visited by her late husband's twin brother, forcing her to confront her past, the loss, and try to reconstruct her life from the rubble. It is a fitting follow-up to Heather Raffo's 9 Parts of Desire, last season's look at the impact of the war in-country. The play begins about a year after Craig's death. Kelly has remained in the Manhattan apartment they shared, but has not been available when her brother-in-law Peter tried to contact her by telephone or mail. True to his narcissistic form, he just shows up at her door one night after walking out on his performance in Long Day's Journey Into Night to escape a homophobic colleague. She is clearly taken aback by his arrival, but they engage in cheery, if awkward chitchat.
Which comes first, the political or the personal? Is Dying City about the devastating effects of September 11th and the Iraq war, or the damage caused by dysfunctional families and interpersonal relationships? And is the referenced city Baghdad, New York, or both? Either way, this is a difficult play to sit through, partly due to its intensity and partly due to its lack of clarity. The playwright has said that he wanted to write about truthfulness in an intimate relationship and found a parallel in the deceit practiced by the Administration to justify the invasion. While trying to focus on the former, he uses the latter to make an important, if muddied, political statement. War perpetuates pain – in the field, on the home front, and in the psyche.
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