Chicago Tribune - Somewhat Recommended
"...The performances, as you'd expect from these particular actresses, are fearless and intense. They go to the wall to reveal these characters' darkest fears. Witt's show, though, doesn't capture all of the comedy in the piece. In general, the show seems to go at the play as if it were bleak and gothic, which it most certainly is, in many ways. But Walsh is also an inveterate satirist and you want more of the color, more of the eccentric resilience, more self-aware comedy to show through. Instead, the world often feels a bit too uniformly bleak for laughter. It's just a matter of small shift in tone, but it would make all the difference here."
Chicago Sun Times - Recommended
"...Director Robin Witt and her cast have captured the sadness and the manic madness here. And while the women are uniformly wonderful, with the wily Buddeke a master of Walsh’s language, Larson really on the edge of lunacy, and Fitzgerald unusually restrained, there is just something about VanSwearingen’s erotic baptism in a tin tub (with Larson wielding the sponge) that makes all the difference. It brings out the best in the actor, as well as in that trio of weird sisters."
Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended
"...The cast is plain marvelous. Kirsten Fitzgerald is probably a little too old to be a proper Ada, but she brings a stillness to the role that beautifully bespeaks a woman imprisoned in someone else's life. Laurie Larson makes Clara the Baby Jane of the piece while Kate Buddeke shows us the greaser in Breda. And Guy Van Swearingen's Patsy is simultaneously addled and profound. Just like the play."
Examiner - Recommended
"...The cast features two of A Red Orchid Theatre’s finest, with Guy Van Swearingen bring a deep, hopeful vulnerability to Patsy and Kirstin Fitzgerald giving Ada a quietly volatile mix of wonder and mistrust. As Breda, Kate Buddeke captures both the resigned, thick-skinned toughness of woman hardened by time and circumstance and the free-wheeling sensuality of Breda’s younger days. Laurie Larson’s Clara is also effective, as a childlike woman still smarting like a lovesick teen over long-ago wounds."
Windy City Times - Recommended
"...Fortunately, this Red Orchid production boasts an ensemble of character actors as deft with neo-absurdist fare as with nose-to-the-dirt realism. Under Robin Witt's razor-edge direction, Kate Buddeke, Kirsten Fitzgerald, Laurie Larson and Guy Van Swearingen deliver performances cutting to the core of Walsh's often-precious wordplay to reveal the unspoken anguish simmering beneath the peaceful surface that continues to embody the Irish ethos."
Copley News Service - Highly Recommended
"...Under Robin Witt’s directing, the four performers are all in enviable command of their roles. If the audience has problems discerning the narrative threads of the play, the actors surge through the play with complete assurance, alternating the white-hot bursts of language with sudden Pinterian silences that can be as eloquent, and mysterious, as the dialogue."
Time Out Chicago - Recommended
"...
A companion piece to Walsh’s The Walworth Farce, which was performed here by Ireland’s Druid Theatre Company in 2009, The New Electric Ballroom is largely about the power of ritual and words—to hurt us, to protect us or to keep us in stasis. And the words are beautifully handled by Witt’s outstanding ensemble. Buddeke and Larson mournfully convey lives that ended years ago even as they still go on, while the heartbreaking Fitzgerald is as enthralling in her minutely detailed reactions to the others’ speeches as when Ada speaks."
ChicagoCritic - Highly Recommended
"...The cast of The New Electric Ballroom do wonderful work with each player having their moments. Sporting fine Irish brogues, Kate Buddeke plays Breda with a heighten sense of sexuality while Laurie Larson’s Clara is a touch mad and Kirsten Fitzgerld’s Ada is shy, distant and subdued. Guy Swearingen’s Patsy is insecure, honest yet shy. This is superbly raw and totally truthful theatre featuring lyrical language and quirky characters. It is provocative, funny, and sad. We feel their pain. The play asks “Are we safer alone?” Are these sisters crazy or just lonely? You be the judge."
Chicago Stage and Screen - Highly Recommended
"...Robin Witt’s 90-minute staging captures all the claustrophobia in some very rigid and powerful blocking. Even more remarkably, it suggests the persistence and endurance of the sisters’ need to relive their broken dreams. It’s not easy for an audience to feel the continuity of a ceremony that we’ve only just encountered, but it happens here."
Around The Town Chicago - Recommended
"...Walsh has given us women of deep emotion and loss. It is hard to believe a man can get this deep into the emotions and feelings that these women experienced, but I am sure he did some great research. Everyone needs to have someone in their life, even if only once, later to become a memory. Some choose to keep their bitterness and pain alive with these memories ( as do these sisters), others to move on, but in reality, aren’t we all a little “alone” and aren’t our memories important to us? At one point it appears that Walsh will allow these characters to escape from this cycle, but as it ends, we see that it will not and that now Ada can take a larger role."
Chicago Theater Beat - Highly Recommended
"...Walsh’s surreal and existential play may not be for everyone. However, as a meditation on life’s possibilities being just as overwhelming and personally threatening as its stultifying daily grind, few other works are its equal. Ada has a chance at first love with the transformed Patsy, only to watch that chance melt away because of Patsy’s own failure of nerve. That’s an everyday story–a story that marks and molds a lot of people. A Red Orchid delivers Walsh’s heightened version of that story consummately, professionally, and superlatively. Perhaps that is all we can demand of art."
