Chicago Tribune - Highly Recommended
"...Underneath the slapstick, what comes through clearly in Dado's sensitive direction is that these two wounded and desperate souls can only find balm with each other. That is also what makes us feel for them even as we laugh. "It's the lack of what we want most that makes us cruel," Trinket observes. And what both these women want - what we all want - is someone to keep our secrets. Or at least to help us feel that our secret shames are part of what makes us beautiful, not mutilated."
Chicago Sun Times - Highly Recommended
"...And this production is something of an act of salvation all its own. Watching it you cannot help but think that Williams is looking down from wherever he might be these days and exclaiming: "Yes, that's exactly how I imagined it - and maybe even better. They got it.""
Chicago Reader - Highly Recommended
"...Trinket and Celeste both come from money, and both have fallen very far-Celeste because of her alcoholism, Trinket due to a disfiguring surgery. They were friends until Celeste made a characteristically clumsy attempt to leverage the secret of Trinket's "mutilation." Now each has arrived at her dark Christmas Eve of the soul. Williams treats the pair with a brutal grace. Dado's staging couches them in a kind of Brechtian surrealism full of strange, comic sights. Jennifer Engstrom's brassy Celeste and Mierka Girten's defensively demure Trinket make them heartbreaking."
Time Out Chicago - Highly Recommended
"...Girten and Engstrom go all-outre in their embodiment of the bickering twosome, and director Dado's winningly weird production matches up to their energy. From Grant Sabin's artfully sordid set design, dominated by giant, light-bulbed letters spelling out HOTEL, to the choral performances of the twisted Christmas carols that punctuate Williams's script (several of the actors double as instrumentalists), A Red Orchid's Mutilated is a healthy surprise."
ShowBizChicago - Highly Recommended
"...We might presume that each of us are capable of getting back up every time life kicks us to the ground, but A Red Orchid Theatre’s sharp take on Tennessee Williams The Mutilated shows us the harsh realities of a cold, thoughtless world. The play features two fragile women, who, amidst a world of dangerous riffraff, drunks and frisky sailors cling to the hope they too will have their happy ending."
Chicago On the Aisle - Highly Recommended
"...Life, Tennessee Williams’ plays insist again and again, is a painful passage. Bitter, sweet, paradoxical, farcical. Never mind that other business about sound and fury and nothingness. Williams views the world through a lens of dark existential comedy, and it is on display in all its sad glory in A Red Orchid Theatre’s trenchant take on “The Mutilated.”"
Stage and Cinema - Highly Recommended
"...Somebody dies at a sordid saloon-you're not sure you imagined it along with the denizens. The opposite of Hester Prynne, Trinket and her fierce fear of exposure is a set of symptoms in search of a disease. A poor man's Blanche DuBois, Celeste, "lost but not found," switched pride for survival long ago. Much here makes no sense to any fully functioning cerebral cortex. That's exactly why this magical mojo feels so inebriating. You stagger out of this show, wondering who slipped you a Mickey."
ChicagoCritic - Highly Recommended
"...As this haunting one-act unfolds, the street musicians sing about "The Miracle" as the two reconcile during a religious infused dream-like episode. After many funny moments, The Mutilated emerges as a powerful examination into the foibles of the human spirit. Our journey during this 90 minute work is nothing short of amazing. The Mutilated is a major theatrical achievement. It will haunt you long after you leave the theatre."
Chicago Theatre Review - Highly Recommended
"...This production is a wonderful discovery, written over 40 years ago by one of America’s finest master playwrights. Here Tennessee Williams depicts another pair of sadly tragic Southern belles waging a war of wills. Feeling fresh, alive and new in Dado’s creative hands, this dramatic comedy about shame, survival and the need for friendship is an examination of how loneliness is, in this playwright’s eyes, the greatest affliction of the human condition."
Third Coast Review - Highly Recommended
"...A Red Orchid Theatre has mounted a joyous, goofy production of a Tennessee Williams eccentric rarity, The Mutilated. Oh, it’s also a sad story about the strained relationship between two women—one wealthy and mutilated by disease, the other homeless and selling her body or soul on the street for a drink and a bed. Both desire the warmth of a lover’s body to heal their psychic wounds."
