Review Roundup: YOU WILL GET SICK, Starring Daniel K. Isaac, Linda Lavin, and More, at Roundabout

Roundabout Theatre Company's world premiere of You Will Get Sick, a new play by Noah Diaz directed by Tony Award nominee Sam Pinkleton, officially opened on November 6, 2022 at the Laura Pels Theatre in the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre. This is a limited engagement through Sunday, December 11, 2022.

The cast includes Marinda Anderson, Daniel K. Isaac, Linda Lavin, Nate Miller, and Dario Ladani Sanchez all of whom are making their Roundabout Theatre Company debuts.

Read what the critics have to say below!

Jesse Green, The New York Times: Such underground connections are at the heart of "You Will Get Sick"; Diaz is working a surrealist vein that doesn't mean to make an argument so much as to plant the seeds of one you can have with yourself later. That all the actors except Isaac play multiple roles - Nate Miller plays seven, marvelously - suggests layers of correspondence among them. Most of Miller's are fearful, for instance, and Anderson's are all hilariously tin-eared. When #1's body starts turning into hay, you may begin to see that they are familiar archetypes as well.

Jackson McHenry, Vulture: The terms of Isaac's character's disease are instead metaphorical, even fantastical. He can't seem to move his limbs properly, and bits of straw - as in dry grass - keep appearing on his body. Diaz is working in the mode of Sarah Ruhl, one of his instructors at Yale and his idol, getting at contemporary anxieties by way of absurdity. Lavin and Isaac move through a world that is ours, but not quite. For instance, side characters keep offering them insurance in case a bird snatches them up into the sky.

Robert Hofler, The Wrap: What leavens the often brutal approach to the young man's illness is that Lavin's character, while never ceasing to ask for and receive money, does develop empathy for him. Diaz handles this character development unsentimentally in an acting class that is a hysterical send-up of sense-memory techniques, and it is here that the old woman "uses" what she has felt and learned from her time with this dying man. The beauty of "You Will Get Sick" is that the experience never gets in the way of her avarice.

Sandy MacDonald, New York Stage Review: Does this sound like your idea of fun? I laughed pretty much nonstop, the exception being a few "aww" moments which always stopped short of maudlin. The play left me pondering such weighty mysteries as the way shame likes to glom onto illness - as if, in assuming responsibility after the fact, we can continue to delude ourselves that, however weakened, we remain in control.

Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: Linda Lavin, with her great comic timing, and Daniel K. Isaac, with his expressive skills clearly communicating confusion and suffering, make the most of their underwritten characters. I could see somebody defending "You Will Get Sick" as the work of a new voice in the theater - one that will take time to get used to.

Gillian Russo, New York Theatre Guide: You Will Get Sick prompts more confusion than clarity, but a healthy helping of dry humor (particularly from Lavin) and a commitment to being daring and experimental for its own sake make it entertaining. In a way, the play is like a mysterious sickness: It could get better, or worse, or weirder at any moment, and you don't know which until it's happening.