Tynan at Studio Theatre

Tynan

Studio Theatre
1501 14th St. NW Washington

Feed your inner voyeur with an inside look at the twisted and incisive mind of Kenneth Tynan, arguably the greatest theatre critic of the twentieth century. Tynan unapologetically divulges all—from this Englishman’s own scandalous love affairs to celebrity dirt.

Thru - Feb 13, 2011

Price: $55 - $57

Show Type: Comedy/Drama

Running Time: 1hr; 35 mins with no intermission

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Tynan Reviews

Average Rating based on 6 reviews

Highly Recommended
Recommended
Somewhat Recommended
Not Recommended

Washington Post - Recommended

"...Of course "Tynan" is major-league inside baseball, best enjoyed by viewers who already know about Tynan's testy relationship with Laurence Olivier, his bitter exit at the National, his strained marriage with second wife Kathleen and the cruel joke of spending his final years in the sunshine of California, when his carbon-loaded blood and lungs made a mockery of such radiance. (He was a heavy smoker and died of emphysema.) It's a juicy name-dropping play in which John Gielgud gets a few good punch lines via stories retold by Tynan, but no one's going to barnstorm before adoring hordes with this prickly profile."

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- Nelson Pressley

Washington Examiner - Somewhat Recommended

"...Yet what must have seemed thrillingly titillating and ambitiously scandalous in print doesn't necessarily translate to a lively evening of theater. "Tynan" eventually unfolds as one enormous monologue of a show, not intriguing expose, with nary a wisp of a plot. It feels as though you've hopped on a giant hamster wheel of stories, mere scraps cobbled together from random journal entries during the last desperate decade of Tynan's life. The problem isn't Goodwin's endless rambling, the issue here is that Nelson and Chambers give him such little leeway that it's all a parallel cloud of gab -- there are no segues or smooth transitions, just one long, relentless kaleidoscope of memory and self-flagellation. Perhaps Tynan would have wanted it that way."

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- Jolene Munch Cardoza

WeLoveDC - Somewhat Recommended

"...If you have a theatrical background there are fun anecdotes of personalities like Olivier to keep your interest, and if you are familiar with Tynan’s work, enough of his philosophy comes through to inspire. But if you know nothing about him, I’m not sure you’ll get anything more than a sad sense of a once-brilliant man being wrung thin by sickness, debauchery and the end of life."

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- Jenn Larsen

Washington City Paper - Recommended

"...That plaintive quality gradually makes its presence felt onstage. Goodwin and director Paul Mullins let us delight in their subject’s rapier turns of phrase while experiencing a tightening sense of fatalism. “Feel that God is making his point with rather vulgar overstatement,’’ he says, describing a genital injury that has left him mostly impotent. The Tynan we’ve by then been rooked into thinking we know would never buy in to that notion of Puritanical payback, but to pass up a good line really would run contrary to his religion. His words entrance us long after they’d ceased to do the same for him."

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- Chris Klimek

BrightestYoungThings - Recommended

"...Despite the quality of both the writing and performance, it is unlikely that Tynan will be able to transcend its esoteric content to reach anything but a small audience of devoted theater goers. It should though, if not for the importance of its subject and the precision of the 90-minute performance, but for the ceaselessly delicious gossip and downright filthy material that appeals to some of our basest desires. If nothing else, the critical audience -- the largest demographic that a play like this reaches -- ought to take a page out of Tynan’s book. True, the critical profession lacks the allure of the art that it critiques, but that's because critics that live like Kenneth Tynan are few and far between."

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- Zach G.

DCTheatreScene - Recommended

On the Studio stage, and in life, Tynan commands center attention. With his elegant diction and carriage and talent for genteel mimicry, Mr. Goodwin makes a fine Kenneth Tynan. He shows the man as rather a ruin—in the throes of emphysema, his financial and personal life in shambles, his sexual obsessions becoming almost the farcical machinations of an old man.

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- Jayne Blanchard

Tynan at Studio Theatre

Tynan

Tynan Reviews

Washington Post - Recommended

Washington Examiner - Somewhat Recommended

WeLoveDC - Somewhat Recommended

Washington City Paper - Recommended

BrightestYoungThings - Recommended

DCTheatreScene - Recommended

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