Desire In A Tinier House at Pride Arts Center

Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended

"...This isn't typically something we see onstage, but this play does an excellent job of balancing the intimate—and occasionally claustrophobic—tedium of cohabitation and the visible spectacle of gay affection, beginning with a casual encounter and then unraveling into total surrealism. The show's remaining question is a hell of a lot truer than PFP's marketing strategy: How can something be so instinctual and so fragile all at once?"

Windy City Times - Somewhat Recommended

"...When your author admits to finding his inspiration at a workshop devoted to the legacy of Latinx playwright Maria Irene Fornes, as Ryan Oliveira has, you don't arrive expecting coherent linear narration. Indeed, the "tinier house" might well be merely a metaphor for the obsessive insularity of romantic passion. The more likely aesthetic principle propelling Oliveira's priapic fantasies is the popular theme, previously exalted in hankie-wringers like Bent and Kiss of the Spider Woman, of gay male love enduring under adverse circumstances—post-apocalyptic nuclear winter, for example."

Stage and Cinema - Somewhat Recommended

"...No question, Serrano and Wagener-Sobrero, conveying Trevin's emo-ridden extremes and Carlos's cautionary pushback and Portuguese mutterings, deliver charismatic portraits of desperate dudes at dead ends. But by the final blackout a play has to offer more than inexplicably presented, manufactured obstacles substituting for real conflict. And, even if the scenes never add up, they should at least not subtract."

Chicago On Stage - Not Recommended

"...I won't go into the details of what happens, but I will say that Oliveira doesn't really think through the scenario he has given himself. One thing we do see is preposterous, a Handmaid's Tale offspring that apparently leaves blind, mute, handless, zombielike gay people wandering the land. If this were played as satire, that would be one thing-showing the absurd extremes to which haters aspire to go in a week that has seen an Alabama mayor call for the execution of LGBT people. But Oliveira's script and Topher Leon's apparently faithful direction play it very straight (pardon the expression), seeking catharsis out of insanity."