Review Roundup: LCT3's VERITE Opens Off-Broadway

The LCT3/Lincoln Center Theater world premiere production of VERITÉ, a new play by Nick Jones, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, opens tonight, February 18, 2015, and runs through March 15 at the Claire Tow Theater.

The play features Anna Camp, Oliver Hollmann, Matt McGrath, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Robert Sella, Jeanine Serralles, and Danny Wolohan.

In VERITÉ, Jo (Anna Camp), a struggling writer and stay-at-home mom, is offered an unusual deal for her memoir: she has to make her life exciting enough to publish. As mysterious and even sinister events start happening to her, Jo has to decide how far she is willing to go to make her life into art, and whether it's all coincidence or if someone is determined to make sure her memoir is a best-seller at any cost.

Let's see what the critics had to say...

Charles Isherwood, The New York Times: Mr. Jones's play, a comedy-drama that bleeds uncertainly into dark fantasy, deftly satirizes the mania for memoirs that has felled so many trees and fired up so many Kindles...When it is tartly sending up the absurdities of the tell-all craze, "Verité" is consistently funny...Mr. Sella and Mr. McGrath niftily tread the line between perky professionals and sinister agents of obscure evil as they check in on Jo's progress. Ms. Camp performs a similarly impressive feat in the central role. With her wholesome blond beauty, she's perfectly cast as a former homecoming queen, but Ms. Camp is equally persuasive when Jo is transformed into an ambitious but conflicted adventure-seeker willing to go wherever her story takes her -- even as she gleans that she's being manipulated...Moritz von Stuelpnagel directs with a good feel for the script's mixed textures. But like many playwrights employing clever conceits, Mr. Jones ("The Coward"), once he has shown us all his cards, runs into trouble blending the naturalistic and darkly fantastic elements.

Jennifer Farrar, Associated Press: Editors interfere with writers' work all the time. Just ask any writer. But in "Verite," a dark new comedy by Nick Jones, a woman's vaguely mysterious editors seem to be directing her life in dark ways...This meta-fantastical look at how far editors and writers might go to achieve commercial success is laced with glib, twisted platitudes, but Jones' absurdist sensibility ("The Coward," ''Trevor") is dampened, and the plot is predictable and slow to take off.

Frank Scheck, The Hollywood Reporter: The playwright...is clearly on to something here. This dark fantastical comedy wittily explores the lengths to which writers are willing to go to achieve success...The play stumbles as it goes along, essentially spinning its wheels while trying to sustain its imaginative concept. Becoming repetitive in its themes and ideas, it does at least offer many amusing moments along the way...Camp...manages the difficult feat of making her self-absorbed writer appealing. She's ably supported by the terrific ensemble, particularly McGrath and Sella, hilarious as the comically creepy, mysterious publishers...The play, briskly and efficiently staged by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, doesn't fully succeed in realizing its satirical ambitions. But it offers plenty of fun food for thought along the way.

Adam Feldman, Time Out NY: Written in a vein of ominous satire, Nick Jones's Verité investigates the modern blurring of boundaries in which personal growth, refracted through a (possibly imagined) lens of public presentation, mutates into a form of careerism: an end no longer unto itself...As Jo makes bolder and bolder decisions in the name of truthlikeness...Verité keeps you guessing and second-guessing her. It's suspenseful in that way, and enjoyable as such, but there's a cipher at its center. As Jo's husband notes, "There's nothing that kills a book faster than an unlikable main character," but Jones -- again, one suspects, by design -- gives us no real stake in Jo's story. Camp plays her passively, and Moritz von Stuelpnagel's direction (on the extrawide Claire Tow stage) emphasizes chilly negative space. For a putative morality tale about humanity, Verité doesn't ultimately seem too concerned with real humans. Its heart is in its twists.

Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Daily News: How far would you go to be a best-selling author? That's the killer question in "Verite," a dark comedy by "Orange Is the New Black" writer Nick Jones that shows early promise but eventually strains and collapses under the weight of phony baloney. The play at Lincoln Center reminds that comedy -- with exception to screwball farce -- needs to be grounded in truth. Otherwise laughs give way to eye rolls...Moritz von Stuelpnagel...guides an efficient production. Camp, a good comic actress, does what she can with the material and is just okay. It's not all her fault.

Elisabeth Vincentelli, New York Post: The new comedy "Verité" has a lot going for it, like an appealingly weird vibe and a very funny lead performance by Anna Camp (late of "Fever Pitch" and "True Blood"), as a New Jersey mom with Tolkien ambitions. But Nick Jones' play, at LCT3, is hampered by an uneven tone, not to mention a premise that's both clever and completely improbable. An audience can buy the craziest plot as long as there's internal logic, but there isn't much of that here.

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Photo Credit: Erin Baiano