Chicago Tribune - Highly Recommended
"..."Good for Otto" had its world premiere Friday not at some high-profile national theater, where it really belongs, but in a little room in the Chicago neighborhood of Jefferson Park, where an audience sat for three hours watching 15 Chicago actors under the direction of Michael Patrick Thornton throw their hearts and souls into this messy, difficult, in-need-of-cutting, thoroughly wonderful play."
Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended
"...To cut to the chase: "Good for Otto" is an altogether breathtaking piece of theater, and while it is now receiving its world premiere on the tiny storefront stage of The Gift Theatre, there is nothing small about it. In fact, 15 extraordinary actors, under the peerless, impeccably focused direction of Michael Patrick Thornton, weave such a spell of profound humanity, understanding, frustration, awe and rage that were life fair, this production would land intact on a New York stage. Yet it is the very intimacy of The Gift that intensifies the play's potent punch - a play whose timeliness is writ large in the current headlines about cutbacks for the treatment of the mentally ill, and the countless cases of violence perpetrated by those suffering from profound psychiatric problems."
Chicago Reader - Somewhat Recommended
"...The large cast of Michael Patrick Thornton’s somber staging convey intelligence and compassion, but there’s something leaden and portentous about the whole thing. Maybe that's to be expected, given the subject matter. But the show's three-hour running time doesn’t exactly fly by."
Windy City Times - Highly Recommended
"...Good for Otto is a weighty, extremely complex, compelling and linguistically rich world premiere with challenges and opportunities aplenty for the director and cast. Those challenges are met with astonishing grace and power by 15 actors guided by Gift Theatre co-founder Michael Patrick Thornton. Good for Otto is Chicago Theater at its finest."
Time Out Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...Rabe's play, expanding on a short piece he wrote for a fundraiser years ago, is inspired by a book called Undoing Depression by a Connecticut mental health professional named Richard O'Connor. His presumed stand-in, Connecticut mental health professional Robert Michaels (played by John Gawlik with compassion and deep humanity), is the conductor of the piece, Robert introduces us to a colleague (Lynda Newton) and an array of their clients, ranging from the heartbreaking-an adolescent foster child (Caroline Heffernan) with anger and self-harm issues-to the jocular, as in the 75-year-old man (Rob Riley) who's lost sight of reasons to get out of bed and whose therapy-skeptical view provides much of the evening's humor."
Stage and Cinema - Not Recommended
"...Perhaps the most annoying thing about Rabe's Good for Otto is the overuse of monologue, particularly at the beginning. Combine that with the continual breaking down of the fourth wall, as characters turn away from each other to address the audience, and you end up with an overly didactic drama that has few, if any, pearls of wisdom to impart."
Chicago Stage and Screen - Somewhat Recommended
"...I don't know what the focus of the piece is. Is this a play about the difficulty of mental illness? Is this a play about the stresses put on psychologists? Is this a play about the demons that we all possess that haunt us from our past? You could tell me it was any or all of these and I wouldn't disagree with you. I would say that I don't think the play managed to convincingly land on anything, though. It wandered too much and didn't find a convincing focus until very late. The script manages to be too on the nose and too vague at the same time leaving talented actors out on stage without much to grasp onto. There is something deep in this script that is gripping, but you have to be willing to parse through an extra hour's worth of fluff to find it."
Chicago Theatre Review - Highly Recommended
"...Any of these stories could be an entire play, but the cumulative effect of David Rabe’s latest drama is that, given the limitations placed upon these two doctors, their never-ending workload is simply overwhelming. The play comes across as a smart condemnation of America’s mental health system. There are no solutions or answers to the problems presented, but there’s enough ammunition here to spark hours of post-production conversations. Rabe’s play touches on topics ranging from prescription drugs, alcohol use, emotional and physical abuse, gun control and the limitations of the profession whose hands are tied by red tape and bureaucracy. With some rewriting and judicial editing, David Rabe’s play will be another strong drama that deals with health and humanity. In Michael Patrick Thornton’s exceptionally strong production, audiences will be treated to a riveting evening of impressive, truly thought-provoking theatre that they won’t soon forget."
