 End Days
Next Theatre Company
Chicago Tribune- Recommended
"...There’s a great deal worth thinking about in Laufer’s strange little play. When I wasn’t musing on the end days on my postshow walk, I was pondering another of this play’s more potent issues. How far you should go to indulge the religious convictions of someone you love, even if you think such convictions are harmful, erroneous or both? Does love require that you too believe?"
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Chris Jones
Chicago Sun Times- Recommended
"...Shade Murray has directed with zest and a fine sense of the play's delicate balance of humor and fervor. And though "End Days" can be a tad too cute at times, and has a few too many endings, it also manages to restore faith in human nature. A neat trick."
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Hedy Weiss
Time Out Chicago- Somewhat Recommended
"...On an unnervingly raked stage (designer Andre LaSalle literalizing the Steins’ collective vertigo), Murray’s talented cast injects color into Laufer’s work; Laura T. Fisher’s shaded intonations of “thank you, Jesus” are tiny gifts. But Laufer’s characters are written too cartoonishly to truly connect; all we hear is the author’s voice. That won’t make believers out of us."
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Kris Vire
Chicago Reader- Somewhat Recommended
"...Welcome to everything twee, overdetermined, and tiresome in contemporary American playwriting. On the other hand, witness the miracle of director Shade Murray and his finely tuned cast finding enough humor, warmth, wisdom, and poignancy in Deborah Zoe Laufer's script to make these two hours exponentially more enjoyable than they have a right to be."
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Justin Hayford
Windy City Times- Recommended
"...Deborah Zoe Laufer's play End Days, now in its regional premiere at Evanston's Next Theatre, is glaringly stocked with characters and situations straight out of a sitcom. But Laufer uses the laugh track-sitcom pacing to good effect in dramatizing a family increasingly torn apart by ideological differences and paralysis."
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Scott C. Morgan
Chicago Free Press- Recommended
"...Shade Murray, a director who knows how to flesh out needy adolescents and questing adults, does fine work overcoming the play’s occasional eruptions of unearned sweetness (and even its prolonged and pat ending). Carolyn Faye Kramer fractures the mother’s faith in all the right ways and Joseph Wycoff is hilarious as both Jesus and Hawking, the two extremes that frame the play."
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Lawrence Bommer
Copley News Service- Highly Recommended
"...Director Shade Murray keeps this unlikely theatrical and dramatic brew on track, a considerable achievement for a show that could fly off into caricature and sentimentality under a less insightful and steady hand. Andre LaSalle’s domestic interior set is built on angles to reflect the off kilter atmosphere of the action. Lee Fiskness designed the lighting, Melissa Tochia the costumes, and Nick Keenan the original music and the sound, which includes some ear-splitting thunderclaps on Rapture night."
Dan Zeff
Chicagoist- Highly Recommended
"...even through the cheesier moments, End Days is always funny, and definitely thought-provoking. There’s even a great Kirk Cameron reference that at least 90% of the audience seemed not to understand, which is probably because their childhoods were pre-Growing Pains. The show also has some really nice design work - we loved Andre LaSalle’s off-kilter set, the space-evoking lighting by Lee Fiskness, and Nick Keenan’s sound choices. Bottom line: it’s worth the trip up the purple line."
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Julienne Bilker
Edge- Recommended
"...The cast, under the assured hand of director Shade Murray, handles Laufer’s quirky script with honesty and straightforwardness. Fully embodying the evangelical side, Fisher is standout as Sylvia. The love she has for her family is apparent, and regardless of your own religious beliefs, you can only empathize as she struggles with the guilt that she might not be able to convert her family before the sounding of the Rapture trumpets."
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Robert Bullen
ChicagoCritic- Recommended
"...This show intelligently, with loads of wit, pokes at using religious fanaticism to heal our personal wounds. Laufer suggests a more human source of renewal and faith to fill our needs. Without being ‘preachy’ or condescending, End Days unfolds as a funny look at the role of faith in human relations. This show is hilarious and healing. Elvis to the rescue?"
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Tom Williams
Chicago Theater Blog- Recommended
"...End Days, playing through December at the Next Theater in Evanston, is a light-hearted family comedy with dark, dramatic roots. Penned by playwright Deborah Zoe Laufer, End Days borrows a few oblique bits and pieces from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and pushes them into orbit around a lighter, domestic version with similar, less philosophical and philosophically bleak, core themes."
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Ian Epstein
Steadstyle Chicago- Highly Recommended
"...While this play is filled with comic moments, allowing us to laugh at religion, it is also a think piece that Next Theatre Company is known for producing. Their productions are often over the top in promoting awareness and change in society. This powerful comedy fits this to a "T". Each actor plays their role with great energy and watching the changes that take place in their minds, hearts and souls makes this a wonderful theatrical experience. This is indeed a story of faith, not just in the religious sense, but faith in humanity and in family. Perhaps it is young Nelson that will change all of our lives, or what if it were Elvis?"
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Al Bresloff
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