Animal Wisdom (Signature Theatre)

New reviews are being saved, but they are not currently displaying on this page. We are upgrading our system, so while your feedback is secure, it won't appear publicly until our updates are complete.

This show has not been reviewed yet

Positive

Mixed

Negative

Members say

Be the first to review

About the Show

A ritual-musical blending blues, gospel & folk in a séance of memory and myth.

Set in a liminal space where the boundary between the living and the dead becomes porous, this musical-ritual drama explores the haunted terrain of memory, loss and the unseen. Its narrative centers on a family’s journey through mourning and myth, as the spirits of the past roar into the present and the music itself becomes a form of séance.

The piece is written by Heather Christian, an Obie Award-winner whose work fuses story-song and ceremony (Terce: A Practical Breviary; Oratorio for Living Things). The production is directed by Keenan Tyler Oliphant, and staged at Signature’s Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre in New York.

Critic Reviews (10)

"Animal Wisdom does not feel like it's for the audience, but more a therapeutic act for one person, and we are just meant to watch it happen."
Read more

"What a voice — what an instrument of razing and of raising. Praise be the wrecking ball."
Read more

"Christian's work has a distinct sense of humility. It's clear-eyed and earth-bound, even when the subject matter suggests it should be floating away."
Read more

"... as the show progresses, its intentions become increasingly vaporous, a collection of set pieces leading to no particular conclusion."
Read more

"For much of the show, Christian summons the apparitions of people who have enriched her life, but in the blackout, Animal Wisdom reveals what it means to be truly human."
Read more

"less a stage work than a séance disguised as an oratorio, a requiem disguised as autobiography, and a communal rite disguised—very loosely—as theater"
Read more

“Despite the efforts of Emma Duncan, the talented band, and director Keenan Tyler Oliphant, "Animal Wisdom" feels more like an act of self-indulgence than an act of redemptive grace.”
Read more

"largely busy, distracting and diffuse. It took until the last fifteen minutes of this two-hour opus – when a 34-member community choir added their voices in total darkness – for me to see the light."
Read more