Chicago Tribune - Somewhat Recommended
"...There are also issues of basic believability. It's hard to accept that Joaquim never sleeps off the whiskey he keeps guzzling, allowing his captives a chance to take the gun back. Similarly, it strains credulity that Simone's plane would leave her stranded in a crisis situation. Despite Andrea J. Dymond's sinewy direction, there are stretches here where Nottage seems more interested in having her characters dig themselves into holes (though they do it with plenty of comic elan) rather than truly reveal their motivations."
Chicago Reader - Somewhat Recommended
"...It should be an explosive mix, but Lynn Nottage's talky, ill-plotted 1997 play is largely inert. The characters’ opposing interests and their conflicting visions of "real Africa" are reiterated rather than developed for two long hours, leading to a hostage crisis of escalating implausibility. Andrea J. Dymond's ponderous Eclipse Theatre production clings doggedly to the script's schematic surface."
Time Out Chicago - Recommended
"...By the end of the play, however, this focus and honesty has left us with little other than a stage full of recognizable but largely unlikeable people (Elana Elyce's Ama is the notable exception). That high-spirited opening in which the Bradleys recount what they've seen seems so callous on reflection it's almost sociopathic. If it's meant to be a deeply cynical romp on the human capacity to fail to learn from experience, then, the play could use a few more daggers. As a drama of the politics of contemporary Africa, the most salient and tragic point the play leaves us with is the casual indifference it presents."
Stage and Cinema - Somewhat Recommended
"...Regrettably, Nottage turns the residents’ potentially engrossing captivity into either talkfest or illustrated lecture about the dangers of mythologizing Africa. She clearly sides with Joaquim, a dangerously desperate underdog—even though his gun-flailing tends to forfeit some sympathy (it’s hard to concentrate on nuances in dialogue when you always fear imminent violence)."
ChicagoCritic - Recommended
"...The problem is that it takes Joaquim far too long in stage-time to injure one of the hostages enough to create a sense of menace, let alone the time that is supposed to have passed within the story. He’s just one guy with six hostages, one of whom, Mr. Blake, is experienced in dirty business of all sorts. And yet he holds them for days. The play is also dated in some ways, like the line about how everybody in Africa has a cell phone, but they don’t get service. Today, Africans usually get more reliable service on their cell phones than on their landlines, so the isolation the set-up requires wouldn’t happen. I also doubt even the UN would deliberately abandon one of its workers like that. If you can get past these logical fallacies, and accept the play as an allegory or a presentation of ideas, it works well. If you’ve enjoyed the other work Eclipse has done this season, you may also appreciate a chance to see Nottage in her early days, and track her development. The most important information you need when deciding to see this is that Eclipse has made the play as strong as it can be, but it is an early work."
Chicago Stage and Screen - Somewhat Recommended
"...On a different level, the question of predictability affects the text itself, but by offering us a realist, "well-made play" set in Africa, Nottage accomplishes something subtle and smart. The Chekhovian gun that must go off at the end, the "entrapment" of the characters used as a plot device, the reversal of the Master/Slave relationship, the Martinis that fuel the emotions... all of these well-established theatrical conventions signal towards an end which is easily guessable by the time intermission arrives. Likewise, the "Hotel Rwanda vision" of Africa, the unforgiving bush, the somewhat archetypal characters, all point towards earlier and omnipresent representations of the continent in the Western imagination. At the beginning of the play, David says that the goal of their trip was "to see Africa without the filter." But what we get is the exact opposite: a story about Africa told through the filter of the European realist, theater tradition. By introducing this tension, Mud, River, Stone shows us how challenging, how fraught, if not impossible, the project of writing Africa can be."
