Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...At the time "Bent" first opened, the history of gay men in the Holocaust had not been well explored in popular culture — nor had the pink triangle been defiantly re-appropriated by AIDS activists such as ACT UP. In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision — and with transgender citizens becoming even more visible in discussing the dangers they still face — Sherman's play feels like both a history lesson and a cautionary tale. But thanks to Fromm's spare but intelligent directorial hand and the sensitive performances of Kourtis and Weisman, it's also a moving tragic love story."
Chicago Sun Times - Recommended
"...Sherman’s story, now being staged by The Other Theatre Company (a new entity “dedicated to telling the stories of individuals or groups who are ‘othered’ or marginalized in society”), takes “otherness” to the edge as it homes in on a man who would rather wear the yellow star of David (even if not a Jew) to the pink triangle. Such distinctions are simply ludicrous. That acknowledged, the play proceeds to explore something else: How love can somehow emerge under even the most horrific, brutalizing conditions."
Chicago Reader - Somewhat Recommended
"...For all his canniness Max ends up in Dachau, where he meets and befriends another gay prisoner named Horst. Their relationship turns on the fact that Max is masquerading as a Jew in order to get what might be laughingly referred to as preferential treatment if anyone were laughing. And there's the rub. Despite a classic moment or two-such as when Max and Horst talk themselves through sex while under guard-Bent boils down to a game of competitive suffering. Keira Fromm's staging for the Other Theatre Company isn't strong enough to mitigate the moral grotesqueness of that game."
Windy City Times - Recommended
"...Their efforts cannot wholly disguise the purpose of Sherman's propagandistic exposition as an excuse to conduct an existential dialogue on the difficulties of identity, commitment and loving under duress ( an exercise bearing more than passing resemblance to an R-rated Waiting For Godot ). Nik Kourtis and Alex Weisman gamely flex their actorly muscles, embracing every opportunity for subtextual grace notes to ensure that the spiritual growth of their respective personae achieves a level of engagement enabling us to overlook the inconsistencies marring this undeniably flawed script."
Stage and Cinema - Somewhat Recommended
"...Too often in this 140-minute straightforward Bent the complexity of conflicting loyalties is sacrificed to easily accessible emotions, though Stephen Rader as Max’s cold and closeted uncle drives home the betrayal of the divided and conquered. He’d rather cruise a “fluff” in the park than rescue his nephew. That act indicts as much as the Gestapo’s systematic cruelty. Of course, Stonewall was still a generation ahead and a Supreme Court decision two generations later."
ChicagoCritic - Highly Recommended
"...Much of the dialogue sounds similar to Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which Kourtis and Weisman were in at TimeLine Theatre Company, in its defiant insistence on something anyone going to see this play already knows. Nonetheless, Bent is a character-driven story about people who were deprived of their ability to be the drivers in their own lives, and that is a rich source for drama. Even though the odds are long on concentration camp prisoners in 1934 surviving until liberation, we see people who are doomed choose to love, claim their dignity, and maintain their senses of humor anyway. Fromm writes in her program note that’s what she found most interesting about Bent, and it shines through in her production."
Chicago Theatre Review - Recommended
"...The Other Theatre Company’s second production is worth seeing because this is a group dedicated to telling stories of those who have been marginalized in history. It’s an important production, if only for Alex Weisman’s stirring performance. His portrayal of a young man attempting, against all odds, to rise above the barbarous treatment by the Third Reich is heartbreaking and astonishing. This play also acknowledges an historically important event that should be experienced, if to remind us of the inexplicable inhumanity of which people are capable. This play depicts a descent into hell which, hopefully, will never be repeated."
The Fourth Walsh - Highly Recommended
"...BENT is an important story to be seen and understood as a painful reminder of what people are capable of doing to each other."
