Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...Even if Guirgis' play doesn't always add up, the individual pieces are highly watchable. Jethmalani's production gets a little overstated in the small space, with some dialogue lost in the echoes. But Nieves' resonant performance negotiates the line between adolescence and adulthood, faith and nihilism and other boundaries that cage in Angel's soul as surely as the Rikers walls encase his body."
Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended
"...Along with its meditation on crime and punishment and moral responsibility, it is the complex, and never-sentimentalized relationship that develops between Jenkins and Cruz that is most crucial here, with Guirgis supplying the men with ferocious arguments. Such playwrights as Tennessee Williams, Jean Genet and Miguel Pinero, among many others, have explored this theme of men behind bars. But under the fiery, no-holds-barred direction of Anish Jethmalani —whose five stellar actors are giving uniformly scorching performances — the human and legal issues explored here are more nuanced, and have the power to shake you to the bones."
Chicago Reader - Somewhat Recommended
"...Undermined by too-neat speeches and a surfeit of metaphors, Anish Jethmalani's awkwardly blocked production for Eclipse Theatre-which is devoting its season to Guirgis-isn't the damning indictment of the U.S. prison system that it wants to be. But Johnathan Nieves's raw performance as a headstrong, ultimately empathetic youth is heartbreaking."
Time Out Chicago - Recommended
"...Though the performances are powerful and energetic, the nuances of the play's quieter moments of the play are lost due to a poorly conceived set. A beam placed in between the cells of the set renders a large portion of the central playing space obstructed; Nieves has a number of quiet, reflective moments that are completely lost to the half the audience."
ChicagoCritic - Recommended
"...The other actors do fine with their characters, who are written to mostly speak through direct-address. Their monologues are all interesting, at least, but Guirgis was mainly interested in having Angel and Lucius debate. In fact, he was more interested in spiritual conflict than he really was in exploring the legal system, as demonstrated by Mary Jane risking her career for Angel and doing extraordinarily well with a strategy which depends on jury nullification. This is the sort of thing you either accept with Guirgis's early work or you don't. If you do, then the language in which his characters grapple with the esoteric is delightful, though the content of their arguments is the kind a person without formal education in theology can follow."
Chicago Theater Beat - Highly Recommended
"...Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train is a treasure in every sense of the word. Dig it up. Dust off all the dirt you can. Then embrace the encrusted grime as part of the tarnished gold. Enter Eclipse Theatre's stunning production, and leave forever changed."
Splash Magazine - Highly Recommended
"...Many hours after the final curtain falls, you too may be ruminating on the sadistic guard’s repeated threats to “Move away from the cage!” It strikes as a poetic refrain summing up the script’s exquisitely multi-layered exploration of free will."
NewCity Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...Winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Stephen Adly Guirgis got his break in 2000 with “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train,” a play that in 2016 feels distressingly timeless. Part investigation of our broken criminal justice system, part examination of the corruptive influence of Judeo-Christian morality, “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train” is a promising start to Eclipse Theatre’s 2016 season."
