Charges (The Supplicants) at Theatre Y

Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended

"...Rather, the production anarchically wrestles with the delicacy needed to make theater about refugees and the global north’s refusal to help them. Jelinek’s text, inspired by Aeschylus’s play The Supplicants, is empathetic, poetic, and nebulous in Gitta Honegger’s translation (a far cry from Jelinek’s recent writing on Palestine . . . people change!) The ensemble appeals as a collective to the audience, the pillboxes turning the audience into complicit bystanders."

Stage and Cinema - Recommended

"...Directors Héctor Alvarez and Melissa Lorraine have a fully committed sixteen-person ensemble at their disposal, and one of their masterstrokes is instructing the actors to lock eyes with individual audience members during their monologues—and not look away. This production demands engagement. We may be physically separated from the refugees by the walls between us, but we cannot deny their existence or our responsibility to them."

Third Coast Review - Highly Recommended

"...Fascism never completely goes away because the concept of a utopian society or a "golden age" is subject to those in power. Theatre Y is staging the North American premiere of Elfriede Jelinek's Charges (The Supplicants). This play was written in 2013 and updated in 2016 when Europe began experiencing refugees from war-torn countries pouring in by the thousands. This production is directed by the co-founder and artistic director Melissa Lorraine and Héctor Alvarez. Theatre Y is an arts incubator with a powerful mission of theater as a means of liberation, revolutionary action, and activism."

Werner's Theatre Reviews - Highly Recommended

"...In the middle of its 20th anniversary season, Theatre Y opened the North American premiere of Charges (The Supplicants). Written by Nobel Prize–winning playwright Elfriede Jelinek, the play draws inspiration from Aeschylus’ Greek tragedy The Supplicants. True to the company’s mission of telling community-focused stories and manifesting imagined realities to better understand our shared humanity, this production centers the refugee perspective in a way that feels more urgent than ever."