Roadkill Reviews

Chicago Tribune - Highly Recommended

"...the work of Cora Bissett, who conceived and directed this piece with text by Stef Smith, is also remarkable in aesthetic ways. The key is that time on the bus - thanks in no small part to Ojelade's openness, you develop an intense and crucially informal connection with this character, and the best way to rile people up on something like is for them to connect viscerally with its consequences. You love her before, and thus you know what is being destroyed. The other thing about "Roadkill," which is being seen Stateside for the first time and is traveling the world a few steps behind the real human traffickers, is the careful way the piece uses explicitly theatrical tools to probe the subconscious (the set and costumes are by Jessica Brettle) and yet is grounded in a real place, in your town, on a street that could be your own. Without entering that apartment, this would just another piece of political art. It's different when you're there."

Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended

"...The ancient Greeks saw theater as a form of catharsis - "the purification and purging of such emotions as pity and fear, with the ultimate result being renewal and restoration." Too often that sense of the extreme is generated in the most artificial ways. But as you watch "Roadkill," the harrowing Scottish-bred show being presented here by the Chicago Shakespeare Theater - a work brilliantly conceived and directed by Cora Bissett, with a chillingly apt text by Stef Smith - you feel as dirty, assaulted, psychologically battered and helpless as Mary. And it takes a very long time after leaving the apartment before you are "restored.""

Time Out Chicago - Highly Recommended

"...This site-specific look at human trafficking and the sex trade, imported from Scotland's Traverse Theatre as part of Chicago Shakespeare Theater's World's Stage program, is harrowing and immersive. The staging by Cora Bissett, who conceived the piece based on a range of case studies, is impressive in its adaptive, found-space stagecraft if not wholly successful."