Review Roundup: THE TREES at Playwrights Horizons; What Did the Critics Think?

Playwrights Horizons and Page 73 Productions present the world premiere of Agnes Borinsky's The Trees, directed by Tina Satter.

In The Trees, siblings Sheila and David unwittingly establish a utopian community in a public park after waking up and realizing their feet have rooted into the ground. Borinsky's mischievously human play is quite literally grounded in relationships-with its protagonists stuck in, and to, nature and intimate coexistence.

The Trees, which was commissioned by Playwrights Horizons with funds provided by the Jody Falco and Jeffrey Steinman commission for Emerging Playwrights, will be performed in Playwrights Horizons' Mainstage Theater through March 19, 2023.

Read the reviews below!

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Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New York Times: As a diverse ecosystem can thrive around trees, an ad hoc family of blood and affinity grows around Sheila and David. Borinsky alludes to a kind of utopia in which the world's pedestrian rules are kept at bay, but mostly leans on a vagueness that might claim to be poetic but ends up noncommittal. The siblings did not choose their fate, or maybe they did. They are miserable in their spot, or maybe they're weirdly thriving in their new community. You could say their grandmother (Danusia Trevino), who speaks only in Polish and Yiddish, represents a different type of rootedness, in this case to the past, just like a child (Xander Fenyes) embodies a young leaf off a tree that is hope in the future. Borinsky invites guesses; the problem is that we might not care enough for any of the people or ideas onstage to bother hazarding them.

David Cote, Observer: While only 100 minutes, The Trees (co-produced by Playwrights Horizons and Page 73) is a mini-epic, dense with character chatter that mixes the trivial and the tragic. Who else but the wizardly Tina Satter (Is This A Room) could orchestrate the frisky moods of Borinsky's vision, from hysterical campiness to desolation and loss, all wrapped in hallucinatory design. The (adorable) company is costumed with rainbow colors by Enver Chakartash. They pop against Parker Lutz's white pavilion, which suggests an extraterrestrial's idea of neoclassical architecture. Thomas Dunn's lime, orange and magenta washes of light and sound designer Tei Blow's drones and tones soothe and unsettle in equal measure. When so many new plays preach against the obvious ills of our times, or peddle televisual reality, let's cherish the dreamers and subverters, queering the form so our imagination can climb to the highest branches.

Robert Hofler, The Wrap: The surprising thing about a play starring human trees is how flat the dialogue is. Also, for such a fantastical story, director Tina Satter takes a very literal approach as she loads the stark all-white set (by Parker Lutz) with more props than the Met Opera's vintage production of "La Boheme." Once all these carts, picnic baskets, grills, party streamers, hoses and more have littered the stage, they take an eternity to remove so that the next scene can begin.

Jackson McHenry, Vulture: Borinsky's upside-down structure contributes to this open-endedness: We get the climax first, and then search for the action that might have incited it afterward. The one act ends not when things are resolved but when they feel suitably diffuse. If you're not in the mood to let your mind dance along to its particular tune, you may find The Trees exhausting, but there's a challenging playfulness at work. "What if we don't have to worry about the end of the world because the world has already ended?" Borinsky says about her thinking in her program note "What if we admit the catastrophe from the beginning, soften our bodies to admit all that grief, all that worry, all that rage?" That might sound like an invitation to shrug and say, well, what can you do?, but the way that question is phrased still leaves the grief, worry, and rage in the equation, like heavy metals in the soil. Is it possible to metabolize those horrors and still feel serene? To be still, and yet still productive? I don't know. I guess a tree would be pretty good at it.

Joe Dziemianowicz, New York Theatre Guide: Tina Satter directs the mixed-bag production that runs 105 minutes without intermission. Performances range from fine to so-so. Parker Lutz's set features clean lines, curved steps, and tree-like columns, lit dramatically by Thomas Dunn. Enver Chakartash's costumes give off a bright tie-dye convention vibe.

Cameron Kelsall, Exeunt NYC: I anticipate that some people will leave The Trees with a highly personal connection to the material, while others will be left scratching their heads. I fell somewhere in the middle. In an program essay, Borinsky writes that "the life we look back on is rarely the life we thought we were building." That's a beautiful and true sentiment, appropriate for dramatic investigation, but here, it gets subsumed by too many concurrent ideas.

Photo Credit: Chelcie Parry

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