Washington Post - Recommended
"...For most of the play's 90 minutes, six people, plus two who appear briefly, bash around in a pitch-black London flat after a fuse has blown. With no flashlights, candles or cigarette lighters at hand, the characters slam into hot radiators, sharp furniture, tricky staircases and one another, grabbing drinks on purpose and the odd breast by mistake."
DC Theater Arts - Highly Recommended
"...No Rules Theatre Company gets off to a fantastic start at its new location at Signature Theatre in Arlington, Virginia, with Peter Shaffer's hysterical Black Comedy."
Washington City Paper - Highly Recommended
"...One after another, the actors who come stumbling onstage are astonishingly funny and all on the same page in terms of putting on a farce: There is no slapstick or wink-wink mugging. The show opens with the theater in total darkness. We hear Kathryn Saffell's Carol before we see her, clacking her heels, whining about the gaudy-poo furniture, and smacking lips with Jerzy Gwiazdowski, her "Brindsley-Poo." Gwiazdowski, a Broadway vet who recently snagged a bit part in HBO's Girls, is here for No Rules because-why else?-he went to UNCSA. When the lights go out in Brindsley's flat, the lights go on in the theater, and we see the great detail that has gone into creating this abode of bohemian squalor, from the rusty vintage appliances to the box of Twinkles cereal on a shelf. (UNCSA grad John Bowhers designed the set.) The magic of the show is its carefully managed chaos-for example, when one lamp falls over, it knocks into a rocking chair, causing a cast member to go flying."
Washington Blade - Recommended
"...The very able cast is game indeed, ready and willing to fall over chairs and bump into walls in the dark. There’s an especially wonderful mid-play sequence in which Gwiazdowski’s agility and physical comedy talents along with director Matt Cowart’s amusingly inventive staging are shown to best advantage. While guests exchange middle class mundanities, Gwiazdowski’s Brindsley moves a roomful of secretly borrowed furniture in the dark from his bohemian digs (compliments of John Bowhers) back to Gorringe’s piss elegant flat down the hall."
MD Theatre Guide - Recommended
"...All the actors do a fantastic job embodying their characters, both their identities and their class identifications. Johanna Day's Margaret was a gritty survivor, with a mad streak of passive-agressiveness, as Day combines a gentle "niceness" with a sharp, penetrating wit, particularly as it relates to Margaret's personal affairs and to the "lace curtain" Irish which Mike, despite his denials, has now become. McWilliams' Jean, whose job and marital status the script keeps a mystery, provides Margaret with advice on how to approach life more directly, and was a delight to listen to. Rounding out the trio of Southie women, Ms. Knower's Dottie is the hysterical incarnation of the kind of person you would never want to engage verbally. Not only is she persistent, but she seems genetically incapable of listening."
DCTheatreScene - Recommended
Black Comedy is so named because it takes place, almost in its entirety, during a blackout. Fortunately for us, playwright Peter Shaffer (Marat/Sade, Equus, Amadeus) applies a sort of pretzel logic to the lighting scheme: when the characters are supposed to be in normal light, we are enveloped in velvety blackness, and after the lights go out, well, it’s lights full up, and we see the characters, blinking and stumbling, through the imaginary darkness. Light is darkness, darkness is light – get it? (Sounds a little Orwellian, doesn’t it?)
