Review Roundup: Clare Barron's SHHHH at Atlantic Theater Company

Atlantic Theater Company just celebrated opening night of Shhhh, written, directed by, and featuring Clare Barron (Pulitzer Prize finalist Dance Nation). Shhhh will run through Sunday, February 13th at Atlantic Stage 2 (330 West 16th Street).

In addition to Clare Barron, the cast of Shhhh includes Janice Amaya (Cartography), Annie Fang (Off-Broadway debut), Nina Grollman (To Kill a Mockingbird), Greg Keller (Halfway Bitches Go Straight to Heaven), and Constance Shulman (The Rose Tattoo).

Penny flirts at a morbid anatomy museum. Kyle tells stories of dismemberment. Sally turns you on with tea and biscuits, and Shareen prepares a mysterious potion. A study in kink, trauma, pleasure, and revenge...

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

Maya Phillips, New York Times: "Shhhh!" doesn't have a traditional narrative; there's no antagonist, and there's not much of a sense of causality across scenes. The work itself has the feel of a series of flirtations: discomfort, assaults, insecurities and sorrows are spoken about and alluded to, but not detailed. We don't get back stories or explainers. We just get the way these people speak and move and touch in relationship to one another. It's telling that most of the sex acts mentioned are ones of penetration and discharge but much less often about the simple delicacies of a caress, or a kiss.

Helen Shaw, Vulture: A certain flicker of danger is also part of Clare Barron's graphic Shhhh at the Atlantic Theater Company's small Stage 2. It's a play similarly interested in intimacy - and underwear and sex and misery. There's less craft in Shhhh than in some of Barron's other pieces; the mad Dionysian excess of Dance Nation or I'll Never Love Again does appear, but it's not so contagious here. As she's done before, Barron uses a cabinet-of-curiosities approach to her own psyche - Look, she seems to say, here is my brain in a jar; isn't that useful and weird? But this time, she loses her grip on the play's humor, which makes the whole show turn inward. A Barron play without laughter is tough to take.

Adam Feldman, Time Out NY: Shhhh is not easy to parse, but it is centrally concerned with the vulnerability of women's bodies, which it explores in graphic terms that sometimes spill into the grotesque. Sharp-witted and oblique, the play seems acutely personal: Barron not only wrote and directed it, but also plays the central role of Shareen, a rising playwright-Barron's previous works include the brilliant Dance Nation and You Got Older-who suffers from a range of mysterious health problems.

Robert Hofler, The Wrap: "Shhhh" tells a long, raunchy shaggy dog story in which two sisters ask to be trusted in the most intimate situations possible without their ever being really intimate with anyone, except maybe each other. The faux familiarity even extends to Arnulfo Maldonado's set, with its stage-floor mattresses, which is part of the seating arrangement at Atlantic's basement Stage 2. Those theatergoers who indulge in that seating arrangement receive complimentary coat-checking services.

Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: I'd like to support a playwright of such obvious talent, even when the play is as disjointed as this one, and the shocks in it so often feel gratuitous. As a director, Barron has put together a production that is well-acted (including by her), and efficiently designed for Atlanta Theater Company's odd subterranean space on 16th Street. This is why I'd like to compare "Shhhh" to the "contraption," plugged into an electrical device, that Sally uses on Penny on their second date. As she explains, it shocks Penn "everywhere I touch you...Either tickle or hurt. Whatever you want." You've been warned: Whether the shocks tickle or hurt is up to you.

Gillian Russo, New York Theatre Guide: If you're not too engrossed in Fang and Grossman's animated, lived-in performances, look right and you'll see Shareen eavesdropping, sobbing, realizing. Barron gives a quietly affecting performance, made more so with the knowledge that SHHHH is semiautobiographical. Her owning of every stage of this story - writing it, directing it, performing it - alone is commendable.

Photo credit: Ahron R. Foster