Review Roundup: Manhattan Theatre Club Off-Broadway Premiere of THE MONSTERS

Read reviews for Manhattan Theatre Club's Off-Broadway premiere of The Monsters, written and directed by Ngozi Anyanwu. The Monsters is about two siblings, LIL and BIG, who reunite after a long time apart and must wrestle with their pasts. 

The production stars Aigner Mizzelle as LIL and Okieriete Onaodowan as BIG.

The Monsters will run through February 11, 2026  at NY City Center Stage (ii).

Amelia Merrill, New York Theatre Guide: Playwright Ngozi Anyanwu is very precise with information. Her play The Monsters, which she also directs for Manhattan Theatre Club, carefully controls the flow of backstory, releasing trickles of context here and there as her characters decide whether to trust each other.

Alex Simmons, Stage and Cinema: The Monsters is a layered, emotionally muscular play powered by two formidable performances and technical flair that matches a script full of duels and drama alike. While some viewers may find a personal cultural connection in the big-brother/little-sister dynamic — with racial and generational trauma present without ever being spelled out — the play lands squarely on universal terrain: abandonment, abuse, and self-loathing.

Jerry Portwood, One-Minute Critic: Both actors trained extensively with former UFC fighter Sijara Eubanks, who brings her years of experience to add verisimilitude to their reenactment of the physical demands of jiu-jitsu, boxing, and taekwondo on display. One can feel exhausted just watching them work out on Andrew Boyce’s spare gym-like set.

Jonathan Mandell, New York Theater: Written and directed by Ngozi Anyanwu, “The Monsters,” a two-hander opening tonight at New York City Center in a production by Manhattan Theater Club, tracks the off-and-on, up-and-down evolution of a relationship that manages to be both unsentimental and sweet.

Ron Fassler, Theater Pizzazz: Playwright Anyanwu (who also directs here) is no stranger to the New York stage, with Last of the Love Letters (2021), Good Grief (2018), and The Homecoming Queen (2018) among her credits. And Leroy and Lucy, about legendary blues guitarist Robert Johnson, had its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago in 2024. Her writing is sparse and clean, and she understands the art of inflicting tiny cuts with a scalpel, as opposed to hacking away with a kitchen knife. These two disparate half-siblings who once shared a drunk, abusive and now deceased father, have lost touch for reasons that are only hinted at. That can sometimes feel selfish, leaving an audience to want more of the story, but what Anyanwu is going after is something different. It’s not the specifics that matter, only the pain and hurt of abandonment.

Adam Feldman, Time Out New York: The duo’s journeys include abandonment and substance abuse, but The Monsters is not a sob story—it’s a sib story, in which two people, misshapen in their youths, give each other a chance to remake themselves. For him, that means trying to open up and settle down; for her, it means finding confidence and putting herself out to be noticed. (“I aint a meat and potatoes fighter like you,” she brags of her style in the cage. “I’m a steak fritz bitch.”) Anyanwu charts this progress smartly, without pushing too hard, and the actors complement each other beautifully as Mizzelle’s scrappy charisma bounces against Onaodowan’s musclebound grace. They keep you gripped as you watch them fight for what freedom they can find in the cage and beyond.

Average Rating: 81.7%