Chicago Tribune
- Somewhat Recommended
"...Sexual groping is an integral part of the action in this famous piece about a trio of badly behaved malcontents who find themselves in Hades, awaiting a torturer but ultimately discovering that the boss knows that they can torture each other perfectly well. In most productions of “No Exit,” the hellish little seductions, obfuscations and manipulations of the confused threesome with the sinful past have a weary, fatalist tone. In Graney's colorful hands at The Hyprocrites, they all look like rather a good time."
Chicago Sun Times
- Highly Recommended
"...as audiences for the Hypocrites' production of "No Exit" will discover, it also proves to be great theatrical fun. Kudos to director Sean Graney, who has turned that quintessential existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre's 1944 one-act (and its widely recognized epigram proclaiming "hell is other people") into a deliciously realized 85-minute psychosexual torque that is hip, witty and superbly acted and designed."
Chicago Reader
- Somewhat Recommended
"...The Hypocrites' new production, directed by Sean Graney, plays the material for outrageous comedy with mixed results. Instead of the stuffily elegant drawing room Sartre envisioned, scenic designer Tom Burch delivers a hot pink, sharply raked triangular playing area furnished with three armchairs of different sizes, one of which is coin-operated and vibrates. The room is dominated by a life-size, gleaming-white classical statue—a male nude whose embodiment of human perfection highlights the inadequacies of the characters, who can't restrain themselves from stroking its smooth, beautifully curved buttocks. At the front of the stage are two desk-size globe maps representing the world of the living. And outside the room, thanks to lighting designer Jared Moore and sound designer Kevin O'Donnell, is a roaring maelstrom of red-hot lava—the hell of medieval imagination."
Windy City Times
- Highly Recommended
"...Swaddled in decor vibrant enough to dance the oba-oba by itself, the actors can't afford to wallow in twitchy Stanislavskian subtleties, but must plunge immediately into physicality, amplifying their personae's kinetic response while still allowing the frustration that fuels it to gradually increase in intensity over the 90 minutes of the production's duration. And if the results sometimes veer irreverently close to slapstick, the doomed adversaries romping and shrieking like children on the nanny's day off—well, doesn't Sartre, himself, finally proffer his existential prisoners escape in the form of an irony-fueled laughter that liberates them from their pain, in turn guiding them to acceptance of their fate? Whoever said that damnation had to be gloomy?"
Time Out Chicago
- Recommended
"...
director Graney handles this often-lugubrious material with a light and thoroughly irreverent touch. The production opens brilliantly, with gray plastic curtains parting to reveal Tom Burch’s appropriately cramped set, a hot pink perspective box featuring a classical marble nude and a door mounted parallel to the floor, like a Magritte with David Hockney’s palette."
Chicago Theater Beat
- Recommended
"...Graney and scenic designer Tom Burch demand intense physical acting from the cast. The room is tiny and crowded with furniture and bodies. On top of all this, the whole set is on a steep rake. The design requires accuracy and focus; any sloppiness could end in making the chaos too chaotic."
