The theater is by its very nature a con game. Starting with the playwright and the actors, down to the designer’s paper moon and cardboard sea, all conspire to deceive the audience into buying into an illusion. And somewhere backstage is the mastermind of manipulation, the director, pulling all the strings that, if it works, will completely takes us in for two or three hours and maybe, if we’re lucky, show us something about ourselves we never before suspected.
As with all con games, the stakes are sometimes higher than at other times, both for the actors onstage and the audience. In THE DIRECTOR, a funny, suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining new play by Nancy Hasty, the ante keeps getting raised until the games becomes a matter of life and death.
THE DIRECTOR is a seductive play that gradually lures the audience into unwitting mental participation in Peter’s methods and builds to a white-knuckle ending …
Wilborn Hampton, The New York Times
After the recent Broadway failures of VOICES IN THE DARK and WAIT UNTIL DARK audiences might consider the thriller genre as dead as the corpses populating Scream 3… Unless, that is, one knows how to reinvent and revitalize the form, as playwright Nancy Hasty had done with her thoroughly absorbing new experiment in terror, THE DIRECTOR…
In structure, THE DIRECTOR is a series of acting exercises a legit director meticulously plans and instigates for his new company of actors. A true theater animal, he is the kind of control freak who does not believe in full disclosure at any point in the creative process…
The pattern of education–or is it simply abuse? –repeats itself until finally they make the ultimate moral decision to end their commitment to the process. The consequences of their collective action is more chilling than a vat of fake blood spilled in a dozen slasher movies.
Robert Hofler, Variety
