Review Roundup: What Did Critics Think of THE SOLID LIFE OF SUGAR WATER at Deaf West Theatre?

Deaf West's production of The Solid Life of Sugar Water recently opened and critics were in attendance. Find out what they had to say!

Candid, uninhibited and visceral. A Deaf couple's relationship is revealed through their lovemaking in a startlingly intimate portrait of a marriage - made even more intense by Deaf West Theatre's signature performance style combining American Sign Language with spoken English. Deaf West Theatre presents the American premiere of The Solid Life of Sugar Water by Tony Award-winning playwright Jack Thorne(Harry Potter and the Cursed Child). Randee Trabitz directs for a Sept. 12 opening at Inner-City Arts in downtown L.A., where performances will continue through Oct 13. Previews take place Sept. 5 through Sept. 8.

Sandra Mae Frank, who starred as Wendla in all three Deaf West productions of Spring Awakening - at Inner-City Arts, at the Wallis and on Broadway - plays Alice, alongside Tad Cooley's Phil. Natalie Camunas and Nick Apostolina voice their most private thoughts.

Read the reviews below!

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Tony Frankel, Stage and Cinema: Deaf West goes a step further, as they once again have hearing actors say the dialogue while deaf actors sign while acting. While the production values are positively tremendous, this may not have been the best script for such a device. The British playwright Jack Thorne (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child) has written plays based on other material, so it makes sense that his original two-hander is pocked with poetry (the "sugar water" in the title is Phil's reference to Alice's breast milk) but lacks a dramatic arc. By nature of the writing, which is still very beautiful, the non-linear play interrupts itself and the lines are dripping in poetic-speak and pseudo-realism, as if to copy the way we really think and talk, but in a theatrical way. Because of this, I was never bored for the 80 minutes, but neither was I fully engaged.

Paul Myrvold, Paul Myrvold's Theatre Notes: The sexual action, begun in medias res, is curiously hesitant. Why? The only cue is a fleeting mention of milk. Before long the action shifts backward to the time that Phil and Alice meet by chance in line at the post office. The story of their first tentative moments and how they came to love each other is achingly poignant. The audience grows to love them. There is lots of quirky stuff and laughs as their lives entwine. But drama demands conflict, and when the crisis unfolds, the affect is searing, and stunned this audience member with a visceral ache. This reaction is as old as theatre itself, like when the Greeks felt the sorrow and pity of poor, blind, wretched Oedipus. The good playwright doesn't leave the audience in tatters, but brings us back to the marital bed we first saw. And the rousing house gave the actors their due at curtain call.

Steven Stanley, StageSceneLA: Stunning young Broadway vet Frank, whose first language is ASL, and lanky, scruffy charmer Cooley, who only started learning ASL in his late teens, make for a dynamite pair in roles that take them from awkward if adorable first encounter to awkward if adorable first dates to the most gut-wrenching of personal tragedies, with plenty of explicit sex talk along the way. (Frank, in particular, is absolutely devastating in The Solid Life Of Sugar Water's darkest moments.)

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