After the Fall Reviews

Chicago Tribune - Recommended

"...The debates about this play — failure, success, whatever — seem irrelevant, the themes have a new pop, the insights seem rarer. But at the end of the night, Maggie and Quentin crack. You have to hear them howl."

Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended

"...Director Steve Scott and his large, breathtakingly good cast have shaken the stuffing out of this fiendishly difficult work, succeeding in bringing it to life where other far more high-profile artists have failed. And by all rights, this is one of those Chicago gems that should be remounted in New York -- free of the star treatment but stellar nonetheless."

Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended

"...Steve Scott's carefully crafted, finely acted staging for Eclipse Theatre features riveting performances by Nathaniel Swift and Nora Fiffer in the leads. Fiffer is especially compelling as the emotionally unstable Maggie. Evoking Monroe without actually imitiating her, she's charming, sexy, anguished, ferocious, cruel, yet always vulnerable."

Time Out Chicago - Somewhat Recommended

"... Scott’s staging for Eclipse, the second production in a season dedicated to Miller’s work, captures the murky fluidity of memory but fails to enliven its tiresome main character. Swift’s Quentin is as detached as Miller wrote him—forever explaining himself to the audience instead of engaging with the other people onstage. The remarkable thing here is that the women in the cast do manage to draw credible human beings from characters Miller almost uniformly depicts as harridans and nutcases."

ChicagoCritic - Highly Recommended

"...After The Fall is a long-winded 3 hour affair that can be hard to follow for some but ultimately delivers an amazingly strong look into one person’s examination of the meaning of his life.  Nathaniel Swift and Nora Fiffer anchor this well directed Miller classic."

Chicago Stage and Screen - Recommended

"...Miller's abstract, existential paradox unfolds in a dream-like manner, with time changes and stream of consciousness, all indicative of Quentin's state of mind. Director Steve Scott orchestrates it all like a finely tuned concerto in this intimate and occasionally riveting Eclipse rendition. The juxtaposition of Julie Daley's angry and melancholy Louise and the sweetly needy Maggie (read Marilyn) of the lovely Nora Fiffer is particularly captivating. The two acts nearly feel like two different plays as Miller works out his complex psychosis in dramatic form. But Swift does strike some fire with Fiffer in particular. "After the Fall" is a fascinating psychological probe, as told to an invisible "listener". I know Miller considered it his finest work, and while I won't go quite that far, it is certainly his most personal."

Around The Town Chicago - Highly Recommended

"...Three hours of dark drama can be difficult for an audience to endure, in particular when the theater is small and we have been in a heat wave, but the work of the Eclipse cast under the direction of Steve Scott is powerful and each character is real. Nathaniel Swift, Artistic Director of this troupe has taken on the lead role of Quentin, the alter-ego of playwright Miller. During this trip down memory lane we meet his loves and learn more about his personality. His mother ( powerfully played by Susan Monts-Bologna) who brought him up in a house of guilt. His father ( Jerry Bloom shines as the man who worried about the almighty dollar more than relationships), his brother Dan (Joe McCauley) , also weak due to the non-family family they grew up in, and of course his “commie” friends and enemies and of course the women."