Let Me Down Easy at American Theater Company

Chicago Tribune - Recommended

"...Smith's performance piece, which opened Thursday night at the American Theater Company, was not updated with the later Armstrong revelations. That points, perhaps, to the complications in Smith's relationship with journalism and also to the limitations of approaching any topic largely through the testimony of celebrities, which is truer of this particular offering than in such prior Smith masterpieces as "Fires in the Mirror" or "Twilight: Los Angeles." Boldface names can let you down."

Chicago Reader - Somewhat Recommended

"...In Bonnie Metzgar's peripatetic staging, all the parts are played by Usman Ally, whose characterizations are crisp and intense-though he's not as good a mimic as Smith is; nearly all of his women, for instance, speak in the same fluted tones. As in her previous solo work, Smith displays a huge capacity for empathy and a gift for finding eloquence in everyday speech. But perhaps because the focus of this show is so broad, the monologues often seem diffuse and full of unilluminating tangents."

Time Out Chicago - Highly Recommended

"...Ally, reportedly the first to perform this work other than its author, marvelously embodies its 20 characters with remarkable specificity and empathy. Director Bonnie Metzgar smartly choreographs the shifts, though there's a bit of a disconnect between Ally's need to play the room and the occasional one-to-one address in the text. If his real-life characters offer a feast for thought, Ally's warm, tour de force performance makes it go down easy."

ChicagoCritic - Recommended

"...Let Me Down Easy is billed to be about healthcare but I saw it as a primer on sickness and dying. We hear testimonials about sickness, about the struggles to live with cancer and other fatal illnesses. Dying is refreshingly and honestly pictured with a mix of religious hope and human vulnerability. The healthcare system’s problems are indirectly presented. Usman Ally puts a multilayer face on human frailty here."

Around The Town Chicago - Somewhat Recommended

"...The American Theatre Company is producing Anna Deavere Smith’s “Let Me Down Easy” as part of its series on healthcare in America. The play is written for one actor who has to change between twenty characters of different races, ages, ethnicities, and genders as he performs dialogue taken verbatim from her interviews with real people: famous, unknown, and everywhere in between. Each character is allotted a very small portion of time on stage, but, by and large, we are not sorry to see them disappear. I understand that great things have been accomplished by writers willing to blur the distinction between genres. In the middle of the 20thc, Truman Capote’s “non-fiction novel” In Cold Blood brought novelistic techniques to journalism. However, by turning portions of twenty different interviews into a play, Smith has stripped Theatre of two of its most important features: dialogue and character, and made herself an editor instead of a Pulitzer Prize nominated playwright."