Washington Post
- Recommended
"...The playwright’s fascination with what goes missing in contemporary life continues in “This,” her smart, urbane, deceptively slim comedy about loss and the unintended consequences of premature death. Courtesy of five engaging actors assembled on Round House Theatre’s main stage in Bethesda, director Ryan Rilette finds a gently accommodating tone for Gibson’s exploration of the ironic, wide-ranging and unforeseeable aftershocks of a traumatic event, months after it has occurred."
MetroWeekly
- Recommended
"...Gibson has a dazzling way with language and wordplay, and as directed by Round House's Ryan Rilette her play is further peppered with light jazz music written by Eric Shimelonis and performed by Curry, who both sings and plays piano. At times both the words and music border on becoming indulgent exercises, but the show always remains entertaining. That is particularly the case as performed on James Kronzer's signature carousel set, spinning us from one scene to the next with its many moving parts as if This is a kind of theatrical amusement-park ride. And, ultimately, at Round House it is."
Washington City Paper
- Highly Recommended
"...Ryan Rilette, the newish head honcho at the long-aimless Round House, steers This efficiently, intelligently, and mostly with a light touch; the one or two forced moments at Sunday’s matinee may have had more to do with an oddly uneven spectrum of audience response, which could easily have put his cast off stride, than with any directorial overemphasis. What I like most about Rilette’s involvement with this antic hay of a play is simply that he’s involved with it, period; Gibson’s lively, witty, unpretentiously intellectual drama is exactly the sort of thing that’ll get me to Bethesda more often."
Washingtonian
- Recommended
"...Bruneau is adept at communicating the utter despair Jane finds herself eventually succumbing to as she confronts the reality of her grief. The meaty characters give each of Round House’s actors layers to work with, as Curry balances her character’s new-mother tension and frigidity with the warm, mournful persona of her jazz singer identity. As Tom, Scofield is saddled with perhaps the least sympathetic character, but he paints his choices as understandable and, in a sense, uneasily self-aware. This manages an interesting feat: It makes the audience care about each individual’s struggles while driving home the point that in the big picture, they may not really matter."
MD Theatre Guide
- Recommended
"...This, which is now playing at Round House Theatre, has a cast of five top notch actors with its production helmed by Round House’s Producing Artistic Director Ryan Rilette. Sometimes with the amount of talent on a production it is easy to hide the predictabilty found in a script. Unfortunately, at least for me, you can’t hide it in Melissa James Gibson’s play."
DCTheatreScene
- Highly Recommended
Gibson’s aptly-named 2009 play This is both blunt and cutting (if such a thing is possible ) as it examines friendship, adultery and the re-evaluation of life in general, and just funny enough to make the whole experience feel friendly and inviting.
DC Theater Arts
- Highly Recommended
"...This is hardly an all-encompassing title to accurately convey the many, myriad machinations at work in Melissa Jane Gilbert’s thought-provoking and complex play-now an outstanding and stimulating production at Round House Theatre in Bethesda. The serious issues dealt with in this play are presented underneath layers of wit and language wordplay that convey how the everyday humdrum rhythms of everyday life serve only to obscure the real pain of life individuals must contend with."
