No Matter How Hard We Try at Trap Door Theatre

Chicago Tribune - Recommended

"...Director Max Truax (who also staged the earlier Maslowska piece for Trap Door) mostly succeeds at keeping these jagged fragments of narrative together, and he knows how to build up to a devastating twist that makes us question everything we've seen before. Bedwell and Pilch play off each other with a dash of sitcom energy, as if Lucy and Ethel accidentally wandered into Maxim Gorky's "The Lower Depths." National pride and national despair dance together in "No Matter How Hard We Try" like, well, an old man in a wheelchair flying the Polish flag."

Chicago Reader - Recommended

"...Into their empty lives burst a creepy film producer, a self-absorbed movie starlet, a brainless entertainment reporter, and a depressive socialite, who ignore the women entirely. Through 90 minutes of hallucinogenic mayhem, nicely corralled by director Max Truax, Masłowska ruminates on the post-World War II evisceration of a meaningful Polish identity. It's hard to sit through-exactly as it should be."

ChicagoCritic - Recommended

"...Black humor, such as this play's, is a way of grappling with that legacy, and the play takes several shots at the conservative Catholic Kaczyński twins for making Poland what it is in an attempt to restore it to the time of Józef Piłsudski. But with the country currently in political crisis as the party they founded and the Constitutional Court compete for power, Masłowska's determination to cut through nationalist mythology and uncover what truly ails people is more prescient than ever."