Chicago Tribune - Not Recommended
"...Although this is a writer with some talent, Rollins has just got too much of a pot boiling here to help us key into anything in the regular socio-economic landscape (a dead body at the start tends to have that effect), and yet not enough raw pulp for us to want to suck out more of the juice of the drama. It's a strangely uninvolving piece caught between different styles, really, and not quite computing on any level of reality. Beyond enjoying Goldring's theatrics and Reynolds' dry nastiness, it's hard to work up much of a sweat."
Chicago Sun Times - Not Recommended
"...In the opening moments of “25 Saints,” Joshua Rollins’ dreadful, altogether belief-defying play, two guys carry an already bloodied fellow into a tattered Appalachian shack and proceed to bludgeon him to what they believe is his death — first with their fists, and then, for good measure, with a hammer. This deed accomplished, they stuff him into a wooden trunk (an heirloom, we are later told), and, just to make sure he has breathed his last, they hold down the lid for a good long time."
Chicago Reader - Somewhat Recommended
"...Joshua Rollins got some encouragement from critics back in 2011, when Pine Box Theater produced his police procedural, A Girl With Sun in Her Eyes. Now Pine Box is staging another Rollins script, and I'd say we're still in encouragement mode: the local actor and playwright continues to show potential, but 25 Saints isn't his breakthrough play."
Windy City Times - Somewhat Recommended
"...The all-star technical team likewise strives for, and mostly achieves, the heightened realism of comic-book melodrama, its tone set by Ryan Bourque's imaginative fight design within the production's intimate space. Contemplative playgoers may lament the preponderance of machinations over motives, but fans of the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez school of frontier justice will find their morality vividly demonstrated in this over-the-top parable."
Time Out Chicago - Recommended
"...Pine Box’s excellently performed production makes the most of Rollins’s brief script, which can feel like the condensed climactic highlights of a two-hour play rather than a concentrated one-act. Fleshed out, 25 Saints could become a more unnerving and enlightening glimpse into a region ravaged by “the American drug.” As presented, it’s an exciting, audacious pulp trifle."
Stage and Cinema - Somewhat Recommended
"...A 75-minute exercise in dead-end disaster tautly directed by Susan E. Bowen, this new work by Pine Box Theater ensemble member Joshua Rollins tightly fits the theater company's action-oriented theatricality. It also delivers a pitiless look at the "forgotten world of Appalachia," specifically a misery known as West Virginia. Corruption seems to grow out of the poverty of abandoned mining hamlets where the earth and water are as polluted as the folk."
ChicagoCritic - Recommended
"...25 Saints is a gritty, well paced, action-packed 75 minute one-act drama that depicts how desperate ignorant people can easily become violent when pushed to their boiling point. It is a grim look into the world of poverty that makes folks resort to crime and violence that we choose to ignore. 25 Saints is filled with powerful, well-executed stage combat and fine acting. Drew Johnson and Caroline Neff were particularly effective. This drama is not for the squeamish nor children. It is emotional, raw and realistic."
Around The Town Chicago - Somewhat Recommended
"...There is lots of fighting(Ryan Bourque's choreography for these fight sequences is one of the highlight) and it appears that the, this is a show that will not withstand the pressure of what Chicago theater audiences demand- a good and well told story! Perhaps, after a rewrite and some cleansing, we will see this play return to the stage with a solid production that Pine Box can be proud of ( as they have been in past productions)."
