Prodigal Son Reviews

Chicago Tribune - Somewhat Recommended

"...Playwright John Patrick Shanley, whose drama "Doubt: A Parable" won both the Pulitzer Prize for drama and Tony Award for best play in 2005, returns to a familiar setting for "Prodigal Son" - a Catholic school in the mid-1960s. But the latter play, which premiered off-Broadway in 2016, takes a more autobiographical approach, following a fictionalized version of Shanley through his turbulent years at an all-boys private prep school."

Talkin Broadway - Recommended

"...Regardless of how well the play itself lands, though, the production is very well done. Kathi Campbell's scenic design is impressively detailed and versatile. Stage right serves as the office of headmaster Carl Schmitt. Stage left is the home he shares with his wife Louise, who also acts as Jim's semi-private honors English teacher. Between these two spaces, the floor is pointedly black and bare, allowing center stage to variously serve as a diner, a classroom, and so on, while also conveying the complex ways in which private and professional lives bleed into one another, despite the theoretical separation between them."

Stage and Cinema - Somewhat Recommended

"...From the point of view of the actors, this is a difficult play: one extraordinarily complex character, three extremely underwritten ones, and another-that of Carl Schmitt-left somewhere in between. Tight direction might have brought these performers into a cohesive whole, but Jonathan James is not up to that task. The staging is stiff and the blocking awkward; with the exception of a marvelous dormitory scene, the actors are plonked on either side of an object and left there to deliver their lines. Movement, when it happens, registers as forced."

Around The Town Chicago - Highly Recommended

"...Prodigal Son is an inspiring play about a smart, well-read, brawling, drinking, tough kid from the Bronx whose good luck, good looks, and intelligence land him a scholarship to an elite Catholic prep school in New Hampshire. This is a deeply textured story evoking all of the beauty and hell of a young man coming of age and the difficult choices the school administration must make to secure bumper guards in his wake."