Chicago Tribune - Somewhat Recommended
"...Part of Taylor's problem here, of course, is that change has arrived incrementally to book publishers like the one in this show, and yet drama requires an immediate crisis with high stakes. So the translation of one to the other is tricky. But I don't think that's an excuse for all the inconsistencies here, nor the lack of nuanced relationships, nor the feeling that no one here could really exist in the real world. If we're otherwise going so far down the road to reality to offer up a company with a street address on South Michigan Avenue, there are imperatives."
Chicago Sun Times - Recommended
"...The four “employees” are all fervent in their craven desperation to hold on to their jobs. But Taylor’s play could use some trimming, and the best place to start would be to excise some of the all-too-familiar racial and sexual banter about who is most victimized and discriminated against. What is best in “stop.reset.” – a work that finds Taylor at her bristling, ingenious and poetic best- is when she is most universal. As Vladimir Nabokov wrote: Speak, memory. And Taylor knows those memories are alive in everything from a washboard to a play station."
Windy City Times - Somewhat Recommended
"...Eric Lynch, Lisa Tejero, Tim Decker and Jacqueline Williams make up a racially diverse squad of techspeaking executives generating theatrical fizz as they contemplate the dubious rewards of their service, but their banter's sole function is to delay the real showdown, in which Eugene Lee's Ames and Edgar Miguel Sanchez' J do the right thing and save the universe-maybe. With so many ideas scrambling in so many directions, the necessary grounding in the immediate knowable quickly becomes obscured in a blizzard of cyberjargon as thick as the snow enveloping this columbarium of literacy's ashes."
Gapers Block - Recommended
"...Ultimately, stop. reset. is able to pack a lot of ambition and vital dialogue into one piece. Taylor is apt to describe her latest work as Afrofuturist, explaining that "the focus is on grappling with where we as African Americans have been, where we are now, and dreaming about who we will become." By exploring hypothetical future extensions of today's politics, the play provokes the thought that our issues today are not the endpoint, but rather the midpoint. A predecessor to the next hundred years. Or as Afrofuturist pioneer Sun Ra puts it, "the light of the future casts the shadows of tomorrow.""
Time Out Chicago - Not Recommended
"...Despite her apparent antipathy to our hyperconnected world, Taylor's production betrays mixed feelings; in lieu of a physical playbill, preshow projections give us a URL to punch into our phones for a program, and more thought seems to have gone into Shawn Sagady's busy video designs, on a dozen screens around the stage and projected on the stage itself, than into crafting a coherent story. This comes two years after the play's premiere at New York's Signature Theatre Company, which was also directed by Taylor and was met with responses largely like mine, which apparently gave her no impulse to reset. The best I can say is that stop. reset. is a heartfelt hot mess."
Stage and Cinema - Not Recommended
"...This half-baked drama badly needs the “Esc” button. All means and no end, Taylor’s post-post-post-Gutenberg meditation raises a few intriguing questions, then kills them off. It prefers a Matrix-style cop-out to any systematic dialectic about the evolution and value of literacy and legacies. The fact that the company is African American is condescending and irrelevant–it could be any book publishing company facing an uncertain future. What really hurts is that Taylor doesn’t deliver a plot that could make these ideas “fly.” She just pulls out the plug. (Oh–if you sit in the balcony, you’re allowed to Twitter. I rest my case.)"
ChicagoCritic - Recommended
"...Seeing my generation represented by a magical extraterrestrial with social anxiety disorder is sort of flattering, I guess. I wonder how much the older audience members identified with Ames. It must be horrible to discover your life experience is a hindrance instead of an advantage, but he and his employees are depicted as so hypocritical and outpaced by progress that whatever once made them admirable no longer exists. They do make for entertaining drama, though."
Chicago Stage and Screen - Somewhat Recommended
"...Stop. reset. is worth a viewing for the remarkable presentation of an all-hands-on-deck design team. Plus, any attempt to make an audience ask questions and tryout new perspectives is a worthwhile venture."
Around The Town Chicago - Recommended
"...This is one of those confusing productions to refuse. The actors had the script been stronger would have brought this to a five as they were wonderful to watch. The story, however, written by Regina Taylor, si a bit over the top. I understood that she was attempting to mix technology and art as we are taken “outside the box” into a wintry, snowy night in the world of a book publisher who may just be at the end of his time. The idea for the play came to Ms Taylor when her favorite bookstore closed. As we all know, the book stores seem to be doing that on a regular basis due to our high-tech world where we no longer need the printed page, or at least many young people feel that is the case. In fact, the play looks at many items that have been a part of our lives for many years that are now obsolete or have vanished."
Chicago Theatre Review - Recommended
"...Most audiences, seeing this piece for the first time, require a assistance from a director who can help us focus and understand more of what we're seeing and hearing. All that most of the audience will leave the theatre with is a confirmation that technology is, indeed, just as confusing as they originally believed it to be."
Chicagoland Theater Reviews - Somewhat Recommended
"...Regina Taylor may earn a bit of audience appreciation for her ambition in taking on one of the hot-button topics of our time. Digital invention is playing an increasingly central role in our lives and it worth stepping back to sort out how much we are gaining and how much we are losing in the seemingly unstoppable march of technological innovation. But "stop. reset" offers neither enlightenment, or maybe just as bad, entertainment value."
