CRIES AND WHISPERS OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS

Show	NY TIMES	NY Mag	BACKSTAGE	TM	NY POST

Synopsis: In a sterile grey room, an artist lies dying. Her video diaries flicker on screens, offering consoling images of an ersatz immortality as her estranged sisters hover about, removed. Not a word has been uttered and already director Ivo van Hove (Opening Night, 2008 Next Wave) has transported us to a collective soul bound by the most tenuous compassion. On a stage transfigured by grief, gripping performances from Dutch repertory company Toneelgroep Amsterdam drive this modern adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's unflinching 1972 film about the will to live and the astounding human capacity for empathy amid the debris of damaged life.

Broadway Reviews

NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW:

"The blood has been drained from Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” in Ivo van Hove’s clinical stage adaptation of the celebrated film, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music as part of the Next Wave Festival. The saturated reds that were a stylistic hallmark — and a symbolic one — of Bergman’s movie are nowhere to be seen in Mr. van Hove’s cooler, more diffuse examination of the agonies of a woman’s death and its impact on her two sisters and the devoted maid who attends her."

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NEW YORK MAGAZINE REVIEW:

"Feeling strangely hearty and unbruised? Let Ivo van Hove and the pugilist-dramatists of Amsterdam's Toneelgroep take care of that for you. For the next few days, Van Hove—best known stateside for his traumatized expressionist reclamations of Hedda Gabler, A Streetcar Named Desire, and last season's The Little Foxes—is presenting his vivisected version of that masterpiece of anomie, Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers. It is not for the faint of heart, the weak of stomach, or the impatient-with-a-wordless-twenty-minute-burial-ritual-conducted-to-the-folk-melody-"I'll Fly Away"-on-infinite-loop. This is one of van Hove's more audience-unfriendly pieces (which is saying something), and it's more an analysis of its own stripped-down Lucite stylings than a full-blooded adaptation of Bergman's film."

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BACKSTAGE REVIEW:

"Putting one of the greatest films of all time on stage would appear to be an impossible challenge, and Dutch director Ivo van Hove is the just the man to take it up. The iconoclastic theater auteur has put his individual stamp on world classics by Ibsen, O'Neill, Williams, and Hellman at New York Theater Workshop, shattering the fourth wall of these representational plays by pushing the emotional subtext right to the top. His raw approach doesn't always work—the van Hove "Streetcar" was more of a frat party than a clash of wills between Blanche and Stanley—but his production of "Cries and Whispers," Ingmar Bergman's gut-wrenching 1972 film about death, faith, and family, is a brilliant theatricalization of a masterpiece from another medium."

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THEATERMANIA REVIEW:

"Director Ivo Van Hove has often deconstructed classic works, such as Hedda Gabler and The Little Foxes, where the main characters are only hanging on to life -- if at all -- by a thread in the end. In Cries and Whispers, his devastating adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's 1972 film at BAM's Harvey Theater, Van Hove shows us this sort of desperation through a different prism."

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NEW YORK POST REVIEW:

"Imagine the exact opposite of a joy ride: That would be “Cries and Whispers,” the stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1972 movie. "

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