Chicago Tribune - Recommended
"...Variously resembling a judge, a turtle and King Charles III, Steppenwolf co-founder Jeff Perry commands center stage in the theater's new production of Harold Pinter's famously confounding mid-1970s play "No Man's Land.""
Chicago Sun Times - Recommended
"...So it goes with the plays of Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter. He provides the language, including a plethora of planned pauses and some basic but often contradictory details of his characters. Plot, spare. Stage directions, minimalist to the extreme. But done properly his writing creates a sense of mystery and menace and sometimes desperation and despair. A razor-sharp wit and frequent shifts in power balances make his plays shockingly funny, especially given that there really aren't any proper jokes in them."
Daily Herald - Highly Recommended
"...All four characters inhabit the titular no man's land, a liminal space (easy to access, impossible to escape) where none of them seem to belong, not even Hirst, in whose well-appointed living room the action takes place. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and a well-stocked bar dominate Andrew Boyce's handsome, albeit austere, set which is gracefully lit by Yi Zhao. There are no knickknacks. Possibly Hirst dislikes clutter. Possibly someone pilfered his property."
Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended
"...The sense of menace here isn't so much from outside forces as it is the vagaries of the older men's own minds, implied by the title. Perry's Hirst tells Spooner that he's in "the last lap of a race I had long forgotten to run." As usual with Pinter, we're asked to fill in the gaps in their histories and decide for ourselves where the narrative truth may lie. But Waters's production and the can't-take-your-eyes-off-them ensemble fill each pause and seeming non sequitur with a blend of pathos, humor, and clear-eyed understanding that the bravado of old men (and old nations) often hides aching voids."
Around The Town Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...It has been a long time since I attended Harold Pinter play, and in particular "No Man's Land", a story that is confusing to start with, but as the play progresses, the confusion becomes cleared up. This is a 4 character play, with two of them being the main focus. As the play opens, we meet Hirst ( deftly handled by Jeff Perry) and Spooner (an incredible performance by Mark Ulrich)."
WTTW - Recommended
"...Although a good deal of the dialogue in this production was lost to recent audio problems in both of Steppenwolf's large theaters, the body language of all four actors speaks loudly. And Pinter's vision of the emotional and physical condition of his characters - men attempting to function in a "no man's land," who are torn between success and failure, plagued by problematic sexual desires and are increasingly aware of their mortality - remains intriguing as well as tragicomic."
Chicago Theatre Review - Recommended
"...Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of one of Harold Pinter’s most revered and confusing plays is playful yet mysterious, probing yet penetrating. The fallibility of one’s memory seems to be another theme that lurks within the shadows of this story. As the play unfolds and seems to turn in on itself, we’re never quite sure what’s truth and what’s imaginary because, like all of Pinter’s works, the story lies somewhere between reality and dreams."
Buzznews.net - Highly Recommended
"...Though critics have puzzled over Harold Pinter’s 1974 “No Man's Land” for decades, you do not need to understand the late British playwright’s intent to enjoy it. The audience was roiled with laughter throughout the first act, while the second, darker act is gripping as we watch for resolution that comes, but leaves us perhaps in the same predicament as the characters."
Third Coast Review - Recommended
"...Steppenwolf Theatre’s production of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land is meticulously staged and performed by an excellent cast. Director Les Waters’ four actors do a masterful job with Pinter’s puzzling 1974 script."
Chicago On Stage - Recommended
"...Whatever you take from this play, one of Pinter's best and certainly funniest works, there is no denying that these men are stuck. As Spooner says near the end, "You are in no man's land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but remains forever, icy and silent." They are all on Bolsover Street, forever trying to find their way to Someplace Else and forever not getting anywhere. It may be tragicomically hilarious but, in the end, it rivals Sartre's existentialism at its most hopeless."
PicksInSix - Highly Recommended
"...Directed in easy, informed touches by Les Waters, the play's plot is honestly simple. Two men with varying degrees of literary accomplishment meet in the lavish home of the more successful writer, Hirst (a sparkling, brilliant turn by Jeff Perry). The guest Spooner (in endlessly varied and superb strokes by Mark Ulrich) talks and talks about, well, nothing that they might have in common. The beginning of the piece is, in essence, a monologue for Spooner, and the loving exchange between them-two totally different kinds of actors in different modes of intoxication-also reflects the respect that each performer has for the other."
Chicago Culture Authority - Highly Recommended
"...Harold Pinter was such a sui generis artist that the term Pinteresque was coined to describe his works and those of playwrights who followed in his elusive artistic footsteps. An evening with a Pinter play can be as intellectually challenging, stimulating, unsettling and confounding as it is entertaining and ultimately illuminating. The Steppenwolf production of No Man’s Land starring ensemble member Jeff Perry and Mark Ulrich is all of those things, delivering big laughs via rapier performances and providing bleak insights into the human condition."
Splash Magazine - Highly Recommended
"...This play, a gem of the
“Pinteresque” ouerve, is brilliantly and meticulously directed by Les Waters, and features an all-
male cast of 4 stellar actors. The Swedish Academy, in awarding Pinter the Nobel Prize in 1950,
defined the characteristics of this eponymous genre as “an enclosed space…unpredictable
dialogue…people…at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles”. It’s also been referred
to as a “comedy of menace”, in which “domination and submission” lurk in the midst of trivial
conversations. Finally, there is “another principal theme…the volatility and elusiveness of the
past”."
NewCity Chicago - Recommended
"...This thoughtful, beautifully executed production conveys the full dark power of Pinter's vision, subtly implicating the audience for finding pleasure and humor in the play's starkly compelling depiction of a corrupt, decaying civilization. Shaking us out of our own passive spectatorial complacency, Pinter gives us a world that ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but rather a blackout."
