Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...Francis' performance alone makes this show worth seeing. Wide-eyed and hard-bitten, her Andy is drawn with such detailed compassion that it explains more than anything else the warm ovation the play received."
Chicago Reader - Somewhat Recommended
"...There's just no comparison between cows getting skinned alive and Andy and her traumatized teen son trying to put their lives back together after Andy's five-year stint in prison. Which is why I'm glad that director Jonathan Berry works past the metaphors, delivering a modest but strong drama in which there are neither villains nor victims--just a bunch of people in pain trying to feel better. The whole cast is excellent, but Sol Patches is exceptional as B, the teenage son."
Time Out Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...Even Darci Nalepa, in just two brief scenes as a woman in whom the intensely lonely Andy sees a potential friend, establishes a palpable arc. But the play belongs to Patches, a product of Chicago’s longstanding Free Street Theater who imbues B’s pain with unadorned honesty, and the knife-sharp Francis, whose Andy is forthright and unpolished in a manner that calls to mind the likes of Frances McDormand. The mother and son, like the cows in the slaughterhouse, seem to be on a grimly efficient track toward unknowable pain."
ChicagoCritic - Not Recommended
"...After sitting through 95 minutes of awkward dialogue from a group of characters who I couldn’t care less about, I asked myself, who is the audience for Kill Floor? The five characters, four main characters and one minor one, are each working poor blue collar folks or the children of the crude and under-educated. Unless something unique happens to them, why would I want to see a play about them? Sadly, Kill Floor looks at what it is to be low-life poor struggling for survival and fulfillment."
Around The Town Chicago - Not Recommended
"...I cannot remember another time where I felt so lost watching a play that I felt, we the audience were being played with. Could it be that Abe Koogler was watching our reaction in order to go back to the drawing board and once again take a close look at the script, the characters, the ethics and all in all, the play, and then come back with one that we would want to watch."
Chicago Theater Beat - Somewhat Recommended
"...The first thing that grabs your attention in Kill Floor is Dan Stratton's set. Much of Kill Floor has to do with a slaughter house, and while we never actually see the titular locale where cows are skinned and gutted, Stratton creates a nightmarish, "Saw"-worthy space of rust, corrugated steel and harsh angles. Matthew Chapman's sound design intensifies the uneasiness, barraging the audience with a surround-sound roar that sounds like a mashup of screaming animals, scraping metal, industrial machinery and something unidentifiable but so unnerving you really don't want to analyze it any further."
Third Coast Review - Highly Recommended
"...Koogler's script is written sparsely, full of unfinished thoughts, vague pronoun references, and interruptions. The dialogue's natural ebb and flow is expertly handled by Berry and his cast, with each moment on stage mining the text for its full dramatic potential. The beats between words and moments of silence in the piece are equally powerful under Berry's direction, as is the expressive use of distance between actors. This is a production which uses scarcity to its maximum effect and smartly keeps the tension razor sharp."
NewCity Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...Abe Koogler’s “Kill Floor” is a thoroughly unappetizing play. I mean that in the best way possible. It emphasizes emotional distance to the point of inducing a kind of horizontal vertigo. It sets up autonomy as the enemy of connection and demonstrates how divergent paths can unite without completely assimilating. Yet, Koogler’s intelligence doesn’t step on the toes of his grace as a writer. Like a flawless decapitation, “Kill Floor” has a terrible elegance to it."
