L'Imbecile presented by Babes With Blades at Rivendell Theatre

Chicago Reader - Somewhat Recommended

"...Drum beats mark every movement of this Babes With Blades production, staged in commedia dell'arte-style whiteface and featuring the "violence design" of Alison Dornheggen. The mind games may leave you feeling like a guest at the Mad Hatter's tea party, but—aside from a too-long second act—it works. Trade in the shackles of morality for a pair of handcuffs, the play spits. 'Tis better to have loved brutally than to have lived boringly."

Windy City Times - Recommended

"...The Babes With Blades company has opted to stage the classic tragedy according to the precepts developed in the 1990s by the legendary New Crimes ensemble and dubbed "neo-commedia." This approach combines elements of traditional Roman comedy with the ritual formality of Peking opera to generate spectacle resembling a grotesque clown show, replete with acrobatic slapstick punctuated by a rough-and-ready score of incidental noise produced on drums, cowbell, kazoo, slide-whistle and other exotic instruments."

Chicago Stage Review - Highly Recommended

"...The staggeringly delightful cast is comprised of vixens, female and male, most enticing. Maureen Yasko is a wickedly wonderful and completely commanding queen. Amy E. Harmon is both haunting and hysterical in a tour de force performance as Priestess and Gypsy. Kathrynne Wolf grounds this otherworldly phantasm with breathtaking emotional authenticity in the midst of a stylized asylum of chaos."

Chicago Stage and Screen - Recommended

"...The play was developed through Babes with Blades Fighting Words program and was an entry in the 2011 Joining Sword and Pen Playwrighting competition: a drama developed with this company in mind. There is a great deal of fight choreography, by the talented Alison Dornheggen, and it was organic in a way that stage violence often isn't. But in the end, my mind appreciated this show but my heart never connected. I do recommend it: every aspect of the production is well done, but I recommend it as I do taking algebra or taking vitamins: because it's good for you without necessarily being lovely. It is a textbook lesson on a process and production and it gets an A for effort and for fulfilling the rubric."

The Fourth Walsh - Somewhat Recommended

"...Under the direction of Wm. Bullion, this is an ambitious production. Bullion heaps the shtick pile high. At first, his three gal chorus amuse with their chowderheaded shenanigans. After a short while, that buffoonery times three gets old. It throws the lively show pace off by repeated repetition. There is a reason vaudeville is a sequence of short sketches. Vaudevillian humor is best actualized in bursts of the unexpected. Amy Harmon (priestess/gypsy) proves that."