Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...Hallahan's performance is especially good — it's quite a profound look at the neuroses of a writer who can't be sure if his subject is a moral beacon of tragic intensity or just another addict compelled by war zones and human agony."
Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended
"...O'Brien is plagued by self-doubt rooted in a troubled family life, and by the fact that his most upending experience in life was seeing the Twin Towers collapse in 2001, but at just safe enough of a distance. The crazy male-bonding trip he shared with Watson - a hilarious adventure into the farthest reaches of the Arctic - may well have changed him. And it so thrillingly (and comically) enacted here that you can almost smell the dogsled huskies."
Chicago Reader - Somewhat Recommended
"...In this 2016 play, O'Brien spends 90 stupefying minutes drawing an equivalence between his and Watson's struggle, chronicling his own efforts to write this undisciplined, overcooked play and leaving Watson's own story underdeveloped. Jason A. Fleece's swift staging for Stage Left has it charms, but go read Watson's memoir instead."
Windy City Times - Highly Recommended
"...Sgt. Cleveland's presence is mostly forgotten as Watson and O'Brien debate depression, the decline of journalism, and reality TV. In a way, Cleveland haunts the play as well, though he is eventually readdressed. The Body of An American is one of those plays that could continue indefinitely, like a late-night conversation with a close friend. Energy never drops off-in fact, the final third seems to escalate if anything-but by the last words, an intimacy between the performers has solidified, and the audience should feel privileged to see it."
Stage and Cinema - Highly Recommended
"...A seamless marriage of dialogue and imagery, this "deconstructed one-man show for two actors," as O'Brien describes The Body of an American, presents a powerful artistic synthesis of free-associating confessions and painfully pictorial anecdotes. Plays that take us where we never want to go, then make us glad we did, must be doing something right. This is all that."
ChicagoCritic - Highly Recommended
"...The Body of an American is a story which asks us to consider how we get our information about the world, and is a fantastic study of two rich characters examining the question along with us."
Around The Town Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...In 1993, a photojournalist, Paul Watson, took a photo of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The photo won a Pulitzer Prize! Years later, a young playwright, Dan O'Brien, while working through a play he was writing about ghosts and the haunting of war, came into contact with Watson. What came of this chance meeting? A new friendship that takes them to some of the most dangerous places on this planet, while at the same time, allowing each of them to dig down deep into their own lives, past, present and even future!"
Chicago Theatre Review - Highly Recommended
"...There are many things that I loved about "The Body of an American," with Jason A. Fleece's laser-precision direction earning particular accolades. What I most admired, though, was the play's refusal to play it safe with its delicate subject matter. We routinely undervalue the sacrifices that our bravest journalists make to bring truth to our normally ignorant shores, and Stage Left's production does not mince details. Bender's Watson is a haunted man, a post-traumatic train wreck who struggles mightily to grapple with the horrors he has captured with his camera - yet, it is his experiences and perspectives that give O'Brien, and us by proxy, some much-needed direction."
Third Coast Review - Recommended
"...The Body of an American at Stage Left Theatre is a fact-based play haunted by visions of war and the ghosts that lurk in its shadows. Canadian war reporter/photographer Paul Watson (Don Bender) lives with the ghost of the American soldier whose body is dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, after two US Blackhawk helicopters are shot down in 1993. Watson hesitates before taking the photograph of the desecrated body. (‘If you do this, I will own you forever,” he hears.)"
NewCity Chicago - Recommended
"...There are no grand epiphanies or healing moments here. When Watson hears a dead soldier telling him that there is a price to pay for photographing his desecrated body, those ghostly words tighten like a noose around his neck. Later when meeting that soldier's brother, the sum of that experience is reduced to Watson being told that he was just doing his job. Watson is comforted by those words and the grip around his neck subsequently loosens. But it never completely lets go."
