Review Roundup: AND THEN WE WERE NO MORE at La MaMa

And Then We Were No More, a new play written by Tim Blake Nelson, just opened at La MaMa. Directed by Mark Wing-Davey, the off-Broadway production is produced by La MaMa and Carol Ostrow of Stop The Wind Theatricals.

In the not-too-distant future a lawyer is forced to represent a prisoner deemed ‘beyond rehabilitation’ and destined to perish in a newly developed machine designed to execute ‘without pain.’ The attorney must strive for justice in a system devoid of mercy.

The cast of And Then We Were No More features Elizabeth Marvel, Scott Shepherd, Jennifer Mogbock, Henry Stram, Elizabeth Yeoman, William Appiah, E.J. An, Kasey Connolly, and Craig Wesley Divino.

Let's see what the critics are saying about the new play...

Regina Robbins, TimeOut New York: And Then There Were No More feels both familiar and unexpected. More than the sum of its parts, it asks provocative questions about where we’re headed and whether it’s possible to change course—and whether, if we could, we would even want to. The play is hard to love but even harder to dismiss. Its interrogation of the ghost in the machine may leave you feeling haunted.

Thom Geier, Culture Sauce: Like many a writer who’s built a world on abstract ideas, Nelson doesn’t quite know where to take his fascinating premise — which leads to a short coda of a second act that’s puzzling, perfunctory, and largely unsatisfying. What’s worse, it represents a betrayal of Marvel’s heroine, the reluctant advocate for old-fashioned values of justice and logic who’s so suspicious of surrendering to technology that she wields a pen and paper notepad throughout the first act, unlike the tablet-wielding bureaucrats she’s challenging. While Nelson doesn’t stick the landing, And Then We Were No More spotlights the dangers that our justice system faces from new technologies, corporate interests, and our own passivity.

Average Rating: 70.0%