Review: Tesseract Theatre Company's THE INHERITANCE PARTS 1 & 2 is a Gripping Triumphant Success
The Tesseract Theatre Company’s production of THE INHERITANCE was a marvelous accomplishment thanks to the genius direction of Stephen Peirick and the out-of-body performances he evoked from each member of his cast. Peirick took the more than 300 pages of Lopez’s wordy script and swiftly paced the production, making it so succinct that the time in the theater melted away as rapidly as a piece of satisfying chocolate on the tongue.
Peirick artfully blocked his well-rehearsed actors on his small set design consisting of two small risers surrounded by the three walls of the small black box theatre. Paintings of familiar New York City scenes representing The Bethesda Terrace Fountain and theatre marquees were interspersed with artwork of cherry blossoms adorning the side walls. Decorating the back wall were vines of cherry blossoms in a crisscross pattern reminiscent of a NYC subway map. He judiciously used the performance space to move his actors between NYC, the apartment interiors, and an upstate New York estate while maintaining a lively pace to his sensational storytelling.