Review Roundup: ORATORIO FOR LIVING THINGS Opens at Ars Nova; What Are the Critics Saying?

Ars Nova officially opened its world premiere of Oratorio for Living Things by Obie Award-winner and 2015 & 2016 Ars Nova resident artist Heather Christian. Directed by Obie Award-winner Lee Sunday Evans, the event fuses music and theater, surrounding the audience with 18 virtuosic singers and instrumentalists. Oratorio for Living Things runs March 15-April 17, 2022, at Ars Nova @ Greenwich House (27 Barrow Street, Manhattan).

Let's see what the critics are saying...

Jesse Green, The New York Times: In less skilled hands this could result in chaos or camp, but even her Mother Teresa, played by a man in drag with a ring light for a halo, avoided that trap. "Oratorio for Living Things," which was shut down by the pandemic after two preview performances in March 2020, takes similar risks to get as close to spirituality as a contemporary theater piece dares. Near the end, after some sort of cataclysm brings the music to a halt, we are asked to stand in silence for a while, "feeling where we are on this New Year's Eve of the cosmic year." The performers admit that we may find this embarrassing: "We're all embarrassed," they say. But I - who usually slide under my seat when dragooned into acts of audience participation - was not embarrassed at all. I felt instead the kind of awe I feel in cathedrals, where the architecture itself forces one's thoughts upward and outward. Or perhaps I felt more as my mother did when beautiful music came through her soles. Just so, in "Oratorio for Living Things," Christian provides the notes but your body is the song.

Raven Snook, TimeOut: Oratorio for Living Things was in previews when the shutdown began in March 2020, and after two years when our relationship to time has been thoroughly upended, its themes have only deepened to inspire new inquiries. You could see this production repeatedly and come away with a different valid understanding at each visit. The show's current run at Ars Nova is sold out, but an extension or transfer seems possible. Let's all pray that it gets more time.

Helen Shaw, Vulture: I have always been a little annoyed by dramatists' slipshod use of scientific principles - perhaps because I've seen too many plays that shoehorn quantum theory into human relationships. (Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle will not help you understand heartbreak.) But Christian smashes through that old prejudice of mine. As her smiling performers, all in beautiful voice, sing that we are "made for collision" because of our atomic makeup, I believed it. The Oratorio for Living Things uses music to dissolve the listeners into their fundamental particles, then uses simple choreography and intimate eye contact to reorganize us. We have spent so much of the last two years being thrown centrifugally out of our own systems - so Oratorio puts you into the middle of one, and spins you back into place.

Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: "Oratorio for Living Things" is such a gorgeous, awe-inspiring concert of original music by Heather Christian that it feels like a religious experience. Indeed, the music - inflected with Baroque, gospel, blues, pop, and jazz - could work as a church service. A third of the songs are even in Latin...and the concert comes with its own prayer book! That's the libretto, a small, paper bound booklet that is handed out to each of us as we enter the completely reconfigured theater at Greenwich House, and take our seats in what look like the plain wooden pews of a Mennonite meeting house, except steeper.

Billy McEntee, The Broadway Blog: In Lee Sunday Evan's production, the theater is in the round, and community is at the center. The twelve singers flit about, standing on risers and, down below, beneath a floating orb that must symbolize the sun, whose existence we use to quantify hours and centuries. And while the cast aims to connect with the audience, making eye contact and engaging us in a single gesture that is directly participatory toward the end, I feel I would have had as connected an experience simply listening to this piece at home, freed from the distraction of bodies moving from place to place to little effect, and with my eyes closed, finding some clarity in the dark.