Math Prodigy, Too Smart by Half, Stuck in High-Strung Adolescence
DAVID ROONEYJune 25, 2012: Scott C. Embler’s production of “7th Monarch,” playing at the Acorn Theater, is directed with skill and capably acted by a smart if not always ideally cast ensemble. But while the story is absorbing, this odd mystery by Jim Henry has a whiff of stale psychodrama that overloads on sorrowful revelations with inadequate foreshadowing. The rumpled presence of Michael Cullen in the cast as a melancholy cop is just one reminder of the Atlantic Theater Company’s terrific 2005 production of Rolin Jones’s “Intelligent Design of Jenny Chow,” a superior play also about an academically brilliant, socially challenged young woman with parent issues. But the playful, poetic imagination that distinguished that work is missing in this tonally uncertain drama about loss and damage.
READ THE REVIEW