Review Roundup: CLYDE'S Opens On Broadway- See What the Critics Are Saying!

​Second Stage Theater's production of Lynn Nottage's new play CLYDE'S opens tonight, Tuesday November 23, 2021, at Second Stage's Broadway home, the Hayes Theater. Read the reviews below!

The production features three-time Emmy Award-winner Uzo Aduba (In Treatment, Orange is the New Black), two-time Emmy Award-winner Ron Cephas Jones (This is Us, Truth Be Told, Between Riverside and Crazy), Edmund Donovan (Greater Clements), Reza Salazar (Sweat), and Kara Young (Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven). Directed by Kate Whoriskey, CLYDE'S began previews on November 3, 2021.

In CLYDE'S, a stirring and funny new play from two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage and her frequent collaborator, director Kate Whoriskey (Ruined, Sweat), a truck stop sandwich shop offers its formerly incarcerated kitchen staff a shot at redemption. Even as the shop's callous owner, Clyde (played by Aduba), tries to keep them under her thumb, the staff members are given purpose and permission to dream by their shared quest to create the perfect sandwich. You'll want a seat at the table for this humorous, moving, and urgent play. It's an example of Nottage's "genius for bringing politically charged themes to life by embodying them in ordinary characters living ordinary lives" (The Wall Street Journal).

The full creative team for CLYDE'S includes scenic design by Takeshi Kata, costume design by Jennifer Moeller, lighting design by Christopher Akerlind, sound design by Justin Ellington, original compositions by Justin Hicks and casting by The Telsey Office.

Jesse Green, The New York Times: Nottage's delightful new play, "Clyde's," which opened at the Helen Hayes Theater on Tuesday, dares to flip the paradigm. Though it's still about dark things, including prison, drugs, homelessness and poverty, it somehow turns them into bright comedy. In Kate Whoriskey's brisk and thoroughly satisfying production for Second Stage Theater, we learn that, unlike Oedipus and his mom, people who may have little else nevertheless have choices.

Helen Shaw, Vulture: Sweat asks a bleak question about whether work can sustain us; Clyde's offers a hopeful if fantastical answer. Many of the things that usually drive a play are absent in Clyde's. It's unclear about its stakes, and I couldn't always follow the way action leads to reaction - but as the play lifts off into its final minutes, it enters a realm where conventional dramaturgy doesn't apply. These characters aren't heading for dramatic resolution. They're aiming for a place, reached via sensual delight, of reconnection and reawakening.

Tim Teeman/Brooke Leigh Howard, The Daily Beast: I think what is most powerful about the show, as with Nottage's Sweat, is how convincingly epic it quickly makes the everyday feel. Here are very small lives which seem huge, thanks to brilliant writing and just-as-brilliant acting. It is also notable that Clyde's features a happy ending, for everyone. The temptation with a drama like this is to go 100 percent gray and scratchy realism, but Nottage does not do that. The end brings together all the themes in one sandwich. Until then, each character has struggled to make their personal best, but then the climactic sandwich-the sandwich that may yet undo Clyde-is a creation of them all. And with their signature ingredient deployed, they are free.

Peter Marks, Washington Post: What melts away as you get to know the characters are the monumental stigmas attached to jail time. Donovan's Jason is inked to the max with prison tats, some of them racist symbols, but the story behind them reveals something unexpected. Letitia, here called Tish, in Young's smashingly vibrant turn, is all adolescent energy and adult anxiety, the latter brought on as a single mother caring for a sick child. Salazar's hyper Rafael needs an emotional home for his nurturing instincts, as an alternative to his weakness for drugs.

Naveen Kumar, Variety: Nottage, a Pulitzer winner for the more weighty topical dramas "Ruined" and "Sweat," maintains her interest in illuminating the lives of working class people, but shifts strategies here into broad comedy. The setup has a sitcom quality that's paradoxically inviting, not dissimilar to "Orange Is the New Black," for which Aduba won two Emmys; it's easy to imagine stopping by Clyde's every week, with a steady swinging door of short-order cooks working toward rehabilitation. The comedy is situational in both structure and execution, with personalities, incidents and drool-worthy sandwich descriptions making up a bulk of its substance.

Matt Windman, amNY: Director Kate Whoriskey (who regularly collaborates with Nottage) may have overemphasized the play's broad humor, to the point where it often starts to resemble a sitcom version of "Top Chef." But at its best, "Clyde's" is a relatable, rambunctious, feel-good work that optimistically preaches a path to self-redemption.Director Kate Whoriskey (who regularly collaborates with Nottage) may have overemphasized the play's broad humor, to the point where it often starts to resemble a sitcom version of "Top Chef." But at its best, "Clyde's" is a relatable, rambunctious, feel-good work that optimistically preaches a path to self-redemption.

Greg Evans, Deadline: In fact, halfway through you might be struck by the notion of what an engaging sitcom this play could make, but then you might also realize that it already has. For all its present-day concerns, topicality and up-to-the-minute compassions, Clyde's is Taxi with poetic garnish. It's not hard to imagine Danny DeVito's Louie De Palma sharing tactical advice with Aduba's Clyde, or Judd Hirsch's Alex Reiger offering a sympathetic ear to Jones' Montrellous. Nottage has recast a winning recipe for the post-Trump era, and through sheer determination and heart keeps all but the very edges from a whiff of staleness.

Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: "We have what we need. So, let's cook." And cook they do, bouncing off each other's rhythms like an expert jazz combo. Jones is a model of soulful grace, and Kara Young and Reza Salazar bring charm and humor to their roles as, respectively, the young mother of a disabled child and a recovering addict with a romantic streak; Edmund Donovan is terrific as a laconic newcomer, tense with guilt and shame, whose racist tattoos testify to a past he can't escape. (Not since Adam Driver has an actor risen so swiftly through the ranks on the strength of troubled tenderness.) But the wonderful Aduba, in her first starring Broadway role, has the plummiest role; she cuts through Clyde's like a serrated knife. The stage is her sandwich, and she slathers it with relish.

Robert Hofler, The Wrap: "Clyde's" is a battle between the saint and Satan. Rather than treating this extreme contrast as a flaw, Whoriskey embraces it to bring a magical realism to the production. The performances, however, are never as sharp as they are in those first few squabbles over the cutting boards. Only Aduba is able to build on her horrible first impression, and that's because the devil, once again, gets all the best jokes, not to mention couture that would make Kyrsten Sinema blush.

Melissa Rose Bernardo, New York Stage Review: Kitchen workers Letitia, Rafael, Jason, and their guru, Montrellous, spend their shifts dreaming up the perfect Bon Appétit-ready concoction at a purgatory-like Pennsylvania truck-stop sandwich shop named Clyde's, run by the mean-as-a-cobra, tough-as-acrylic-nails Clyde (Uzo Aduba, late of TV's Mrs. America and Orange Is the New Black). They're all ex-cons-something Clyde, who also did time, uses to beat them into submission whenever she gets the chance. "She might actually be the devil," muses Jason. And, in fact, she might. Consider the burst of flames she produces periodically.

Steven Suskin, New York Stage Review: Frequent Nottage collaborator Kate Whoriskey (director of Ruined and Sweat) has staged a fine production, with a properly "liminal" set (as specifically called for by the playwright) from set designer Takeshi Kata and properly mystical touches from lighting designer Christopher Akerlind. Jennifer Moeller, meanwhile, gives Aduba an array of startling costumes that might well chasten Diana over at the Longacre. That desperately doomed princess has more actual costume changes than Clyde, yes; but Diana is 40 endless minutes longer than Clyde's, and several of Moeller's greasy spoon wardrobe choices are strikingly more eyegrabbing.

Juan A. Ramirez, Theatrely: Aduba, looking snatched in Jennifer Moeller's perfect costumes-first appears in a tight denim jumpsuit and leopard boots-and wearing Cookie Jordan's hair and wig designs like a parade of crowns, is excellent in a role that is slightly underwritten. Nottage seems interested in the tension between being in-charge and being plain rude, especially as perceived in women, but indulges Clyde's penchant for insults too much to remember to balance her out with much motivation. Perhaps Aduba's exacting performance, in which the venom pours deliciously from her lips, hints at a richer character than Nottage intended, but the result leaves a major gap where there should be a knowing reason.

Charles Isherwood, Broadway News: For the most part Nottage establishes her characters and their troubled pasts and uncertain futures economically and with compassionate nuance. But "Clyde's" nevertheless also feels schematic, as scenes of confrontation with Clyde (who, incongruously, appears to the both proprietor and the only front-of-house worker) alternate with scenes of communal sandwich-making that bind the kitchen gang together. At regular intervals, we hear revelations about just how the characters ended up behind bars.

Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: In "Clyde's," a savory comedy written by Lynn Nottage, better known for her bitter tragedies, Uzo Aduba portrays Clyde, the sexy but heartless owner of a truck stop where all four of her employees are ex inmates, as is she. The chief joke of the play, which is running at Second Stage's Helen Hayes Theater through January 16, is how seriously the employees take the art and craft of sandwich making, especially Ron Cephas Jones as Montrellous, whom the others worship for his culinary gifts. The chief delight of this production, directed by frequent Nottage collaborator Kate Whoriskey, is the art and craft of the theater making, by an extraordinarily talented cast, and also by the designers, who get whimsical and weird (in a good way.)

Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Theatre Guide: Directed by Kate Whoriskey, the author's go-to collaborator, the production cooks on all burners. Orange Is the New Black Emmy winner Aduba slyly brings out Clyde's devilish streak. Young is thrilling as the take-no-b.s. Tish. The physical production is also deft thanks to Jennifer Moeller's character-defining costumes, Takeshi Kata's realistic working kitchen, and Christopher Akerlind's moody, shifting lighting.