Margaret Gray – LA Times
In Greg Pierce’s “Slowgirl” at the Geffen Playhouse, 17-year-old Becky (Rae Gray) comes to visit her Uncle Sterling (William Petersen), who left the U.S. years earlier for Costa Rica.
She’s freaked out by his primitive jungle lifestyle, which is charmingly evoked by Richard Woodbury’s sound design and the tropical leaves that hang above Takeshi Kata’s delicate, bare-bones set, configured tennis-court style with the audience on either side (an approach that heightens naturalism but also impedes sightlines). Read more…
Dany Margolies – Arts In LA
Two very human, rather intriguing characters reveal their wounds and their coping mechanisms in this Greg Pierce play. Under Randall Arney’s direction, their story plays out with universality and specificity. But the crux of the work is in the seconds when nothing is said, building to an electrifying moment of crushing silence. Read more...
Myron Meisel – The Hollywood Reporter
Sterling (William Petersen), a former lawyer turned recluse in the Costa Rican jungle is surprised by the arrival of the 17-year-old niece he barely knows, Becky (Rae Gray), a loquacious high-schooler apparently hot-footing it out of town for a week’s obscurity in the wilderness. Unaccustomed to being communicative, Sterling slowly acquires a sense of Becky’s travail, disconcertingly analogous to his own retreat from the hurly burly of the censorious opinions of others, and their individual remorse over each’s moral negligences. Read more…
Pauline Adamek – ArtsBeatLA
“OMIGOD! Like, whatEVER!” A taciturn man in exile shares the stage with a gratingly garrulous teen in Greg Pierce’s one act two-hander Slowgirl, now playing at the Geffenuntil April 27.
Slowgirl is about a guy who, we learn, ran away from some scandal in the US seven years previously and retired to Costa Rica. William Petersen plays ‘Uncle Sterling.’ He has built a labyrinth on his property that he walks in a meditative way daily. Read more…
Now playing through April 27.