This Day Forward OFF-BROADWAY REVIEWS

• NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF This Day Forward

  

  Review: ‘This Day Forward,’ a Weird Wedding Night and What Comes After

  Ben Brantley

  November 21, 2016: Nicky Silver is driving with the brakes on in “This Day Forward,” his bumpy and tentative new comedy, which opened on Monday night at the Vineyard Theater. Usually, for better or worse, this mordant playwright can be relied on to go tearing through the barricades of good taste, good manners and sane plotting into his own ecstatic no man’s land of misery. Yet fans of Mr. Silver’s angry wit and whimsy may feel he is missing in action in this portrait of a misbegotten marriage. True, the show has been staged at the Vineyard, Mr. Silver’s longtime creative incubator. The production has been directed with as much smoothness as the script allows by his frequent and fruitful collaborator, Mark Brokaw. And it features themes — monster mothers, emotionally crippled children, love that dies aborning — that have always been dear to Mr. Silver’s darkly sentimental heart. Nonetheless, if I had started watching this play with no foreknowledge and no program, I’m not sure I would have been able to identify it as his work. Though it has been mounted with elaborate care, with a polished cast and fully detailed sets (Allen Moyer) and costumes (Kaye Voyce), “This Day Forward” feels unfulfilled, like a skeleton in search of animating flesh.

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• TIME OUT NEW YORK REVIEW OF This Day Forward

  

  This Day Forward brings Nicky Silver back to the Vineyard

  David Cote

  November 21, 2016: A Nicky Silver premiere sets up a few reasonable expectations: There will be a horrid, selfish mother; her children will grow into unhappy adults; their dad is dead or dying. Those criteria are dutifully met in the acid-penned playwright’s new black comedy. This Day Forward employs a double period structure (the first act is set in 1958; the second in 2004) to explore Silverian motifs of emotional duplicity, toxic parenting and the notion that pain binds families as much as joy. “Shared misery doesn’t make people partners,” Noah (Michael Crane) tells his agitated sister (Francesca Faridany) regarding their mentally unstable mother. The motto could be engraved above Silver’s elegantly savage oeuvre (which includes The Lyons and Too Much Sun, also at the Vineyard).

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