AN OAK TREE: 89% Sweet – UPDATED

Tim Crouch and Meagan English perform in Tim Crouch's play AN OAK TREE at the Odyssey Theatre. Photo: William Adashek

SWEET
On opening night, Gallagher’s grief-stricken father produced an atmosphere of anguish that cast light on some of Crouch’s impenetrable themes. Of course, the tone will necessarily change with each new performer, but the final point, one suspects, will remain elusive. What is clear is that Crouch is an assured puppet master who inspires trust in his intrepid guest performers. In that regard, Crouch’s multilayered play is as much a master class in acting as it is an intriguing meta-theatrical exercise.
F. Kathleen Foley – LA Times

BITTERSWEET
Crouch, who has been hailed as “one of the most exciting theatre artists working in the UK,” directs this production with the help of Karl James and a smith. Unconventional and unusual, yes. Entirely convincing, not so much.
Cynthia Citron – Reviewplays

SWEET
A grieving father confronting the driver responsible for his 12-year-old daughter’s death is a premise almost certain to create gripping theater. It’s hard to imagine a loss greater than a parent’s of a child, or a greater feeling of culpability than that of a person who has caused a child’s death. It’s not surprising, therefore, that Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree proves gripping theater. What makes it quite out of the ordinary is its unusual format, one absolutely deserving to be called “unique.”
Steven Stanley – StageSceneLA

SWEET
Even so, there remains something kind of haunting and remarkable about An Oak Tree. As an exercise in un-improvised, spontaneous dramatics, the play is as unique as any of its individual performances now promise to be.
Evan Henerson – CurtainUp

SWEET
And so, through a frame of hypnotism that’s just one of the play’s many artifices, begins a breathtaking examination of the blurred line between what is real and what is suggested, of how we live in dream worlds in order to get by, and how theater itself is a kind of hypnosis that serves this very same purpose. Its brilliance is unfettered, and inexplicably moving, for being such a head trip.
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly and his Theatre Feature

SWEET
Yes, it’s fascinating to watch Gallagher create his character on the fly, call upon his well of emotions, cold read the script, feed Crouch’s instructions back to him. Is this theater magic or theater madness? Crouch says in a single breath, “You’re doing fine. Is this what you expected?” And neither Gallagher nor the audience is sure whether the expectations under scrutiny are his or his characters. “An Oak Tree” is an intimate, thought-provoking, electrifying event.
Dany Margolies – Backstage

SWEET
The “illusion of the first time” – that effortless sense of spontaneity to which all thesps aspire – is automatically achieved in Tim Crouch’s “An Oak Tree,” because for one of its players it really is the first time. In this Edinburgh Fest and international touring favorite, now landed at the Odyssey, author Crouch both plays and becomes an itinerant stage hypnotist, using whispered suggestions and occasional script pages to mesmerize an unrehearsed volunteer through a moody narrative of loss, guilt and shared identities. This exploration and celebration of pure theater’s power is a fascinating must-see.
Bob Verini – Variety

SWEET
The title of the play refers to the father’s belief that he has miraculously transformed a tree into his late daughter. The themes of mind-control and willful public embarrassment are perfectly aligned with the mode of the play, and the unpredictable magic of theatre is laid out in such a simple and tangible way that its astonishing how completely Crouch has encapsulated his medium in a single act. Each night he wills another actor into something else entirely, and after only 70 minutes his volunteer and his audience alike are left wondering how he was able to do it.
D. Jette – LA Theatre Review

BITTERSWEET
Here’s an even more original showcase. Creator Tim Crouch plays both the evening’s onstage auteur as well as the role of a failing British hypnotist. One-night actors take on the other role after only one hour of preparation. It’s a showcase for one and all. You can extrapolate larger reflections from the play – on the nature of suspension of disbelief, for example – but they’re muddied by the structure, which eventually begins to feel like an acting exercise more than anything else. (Complete Review)
Don Shirley – LA Stage Watch

SWEET
This consistent order-giving can be infuriating, especially if you’re expecting the actor to actually improvise any lines. The night I attended, Dan O’Connor, founder of Impro Theatre, played the father, and there were several moments in which I wanted to see him buck the orders of Crouch and have an emotional reaction that was all his own. But Crouch calls every shot, setting up each scene with specific textual directions for his leading man or lady. Thus, the freedom for the actor playing the father is in the emotional heft he or she chooses to give the scripted lines, and that freedom is enough to produce an entertaining, often poignant piece of theatre.
Amy Lyons – Santa Monica Mirror

BITTER
Later at my performance, an audience member, with a cell phone that was not shut off and which had a message on it that would not shut up, became an embarrassed part of the piece at its most crucial and supposedly revealing moment. However, in retrospect, it seemed like the only really honest moment of the evening, an antidote to the feeling that An Oak Tree is nothing more than a stunt. Still, the audience seemed bent on being conned (one even heard Pirandello’s name brought up as we exited from the theater). But Three Card Monte is Three Card Monte no matter what the critics and audiences want to believe.
Harvey Perr – Stage and Cinema