Chicago Tribune - Somewhat Recommended
"...But despite these caveats, there are some undeniably smart and thoughtful insights here into how we craft our viewpoints in the age of instant media. We can "erase" our online presence, but that history is living on somewhere. The multimedia elements, designed by Michael Stanfill, integrate seamlessly with the onstage performances. The central love triangle between Mike (Karmann Bajuyo), his nonactor wife Julie (Melissa Canciller) and his former lover/castmate Lily (Hannah Toriumi) allows for some lovely grounded moments from all three, but particularly from Canciller, whose suggestions of adding a journalist to the "pastiche" script in order to clear up the timeline makes her the odd woman out."
Chicago Reader - Somewhat Recommended
"..."If we're doing a play about Mao, to a 21st-century American audience," says Mike, a character in Christopher Chen's The Hundred Flowers Project, "then we should assume they don't know any Chinese history." OK, let's assume that. Here are three events you'll need to know about if you're going to keep up with Chen's frantic, flawed, wildly ambitious piece of work, running now at Silk Road Rising in a version directed by Joanie Schultz:"
Time Out Chicago - Somewhat Recommended
"...Chen and director Joanie Schultz hold their cards close to their chests, and the connection to Chinese Communism is murky at best. The Hundred Flowers Project is a collection of devices in more ways than one."
Stage and Cinema - Recommended
"...Kinetically enacted by Silk Road Rising in a bold staging by Joanie Schultz, Chen's ambitious two-act puzzle/protest play conflates two instruments of "persuasion." Contrasted-but mostly compared-are the Chinese Communists' bombardment of a cowed populace with false hopes, empty promises and not so empty threats-and our conformity-minded, socially-shaming social media, whose sometimes pernicious influence often masquerades as self-expression and free speech."
ChicagoCritic - Somewhat Recommended
"...The Hundred Flowers Project demands its audience come with such a strong knowledge of so many different fields, I don’t think those who do will get anything new out of it, and those who don’t will be lost."
Around The Town Chicago - Recommended
"...I am very grateful that Silk Road Rising is giving such talented actors and actresses of non-western ethnicities opportunities to act without having to take the enormous risk that is color-blind casting. Ultimately, although this play expects people to bring way too much knowledge about the Cultural Revolution, post-modern critiques of history, historical meta-fiction, discourses surrounding digital media, and probably five or six other things of which I am totally ignorant, to the performance, it succeeds at what theatre is at its very core: writing, acting, directing, and technical work, and perhaps that is a pretty neat, if accidental, tension in a play entrenched in twenty theoretical discourses."
