If You Split A Second presented by Pegasus Players at Beacon Street Hull House

Chicago Tribune - Somewhat Recommended

"...Duncan's staging is overly dependent on freeze-frame tableaus where one character remains motionless while another addresses the audience. McGorty and Chavara both show some flashes of decent acting chops here, but the static and binary nature of the script doesn't give them a lot of room to delve deeper into the lives of the characters. Since Mick is the blue-collar con with the hair-trigger temper, of course Patrick must be the prissy button-down guy surgically attached to his cellphone and legal briefs."

Centerstage - Recommended

"...The play suffers from unwieldy length and a painfully predictable climax, but the raw emotion and compelling characters make the show highly watchable."

Chicago Theatre Addict - Recommended

"...If there's anything I missed in Pegasus's production, it's the unsettling sense of "what if?" Yes, our actions have consequences - as they should have. However, in Second, we already see where the play is going well before it gets there, which muddles the otherwise powerful final moments. I get the sense Formby and company want us to feel that life is driven by our of-the-moment choices. However, I walked away feeling life offers a predetermined ending point - which doesn't always make for compelling drama."

Stage and Cinema - Not Recommended

"...With deftness and spunk to equal McGorty, Chavara plays Mick's wife, daughter and granddaughter, reflecting representative responses to the reckless and impossible men in their love lives; but with the rushed delivery of diffuse dialogue that lurches from poetry-slam lyricism to hard-boiled, blue-collar small talk, the action and its sometimes contrived crises turns incoherent. What's the point of so much irrelevant banter, like showy allusions to Pompeii's destruction and the Yellowstone caldera? This play needs editing as plants do water. Ilesa Duncan's stream-of-consciousness staging only emphasizes the novelistic abandon of a drama with too many narrators and no center to speak of."

ChicagoCritic - Not Recommended

"...If You Split a Second thus has at heart a tremendous amount of potent energy, but that energy is too thinly dispersed in this overwrought, overwritten and overcomplicated play. Clearing the thicket and reigning it in could only concentrate the emotional impact of this otherwise heartfelt story."