BLOOD AND THUNDER: 100% Sweet – UPDATED

Photo: Tony Williams and Candice Afia. Credit: Jay R. Lawton.

BITTERSWEET
Anthony’s script is tautly written, his characters are finely drawn, and the actors give solid performances, but the production is marred by an awkward and confusing nonlinear structure. Though the action seems continuous, it’s interspersed with flashbacks and a fantasy sequence, so that it takes far too long to puzzle out the sequence of events.
Neal Weaver – Backstage

SWEET
Two character twists may not add up, but while the audience perches practically in the living room of Jorge I. Velasquez’s realistic, dingy set, with the rain hammering down, the tension is as thick as the storm clouds we imagine overhead. Solid performances keep the spell going, particularly by Afia as the strong-willed girlfriend trying to break free of Marcus’ emotional abuse. Sara Wagoner directs.
Amy Nicholson – LA Weekly

SWEET
Director Sara Wagner uses Moving Arts’ intimate space to turn the claustrophobic screw. You can almost smell the rot on Jorge I. Velasquez’s grimy apartment set (the audience is only inches away from the action) as the gathering storm takes on biblical force. And Bolden is particularly strong as the tightly wound Marcus, able to solve any mechanical problem but oblivious to the workings of the human heart. He deserves a longer, less schematic play.
Charlotte Stoudt – LA Times

SWEET
While perhaps not for the claustrophobic or squeamish, the show is highly recommended to serious theatergoers who love good, intense, well-acted dramas.
Leon Acord – EdgeLosAngeles

SWEET
The play is set in New Orleans during Katrina. Two estranged brothers engage in a desperate struggle for the upper hand, while flashbacks recall the woman who came between them. The audience sits a few inches away from the action, feeling almost as stranded as the characters in the venue’s rather claustrophobic configuration. But it’s only 65 minutes, and it’s a powerfully visceral experience, although perhaps it too wasn’t exactly ideal for Valentine’s Day weekend.
Don Shirley – LA Stage Watch

SWEET
Sara Wagner makes the most of Hyperion Station’s diminutive space, and brings plenty of both blood and thunder to bear. The transitions between past and present are seamless but creepy, because even as the mood and circumstances change the blood pools up in earlobes and on tabletops. There is a gun in this play, and it poses more danger and grabs more attention than Katrina ever could. Blood and Thunder says more about life in the 9th Ward before the storm than after and, through the collapse of these three forgotten lives, how poverty and alcohol drowned New Orleans long before the levees broke.
D. Jette – LA Theatre Review

Blood and Thunder is performed  Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm, Sundays at 3 pm, through March 28, 2010. The Hyperion Station is located at 1822 Hyperion Ave, Los Angeles,  90039 (just north of Hyperion and Fountain in Silverlake. Tickets prices: $15 Friday and Saturday,  Sunday matinees are $12. Reservations are available online at www.MovingArts.org or by phone at (323) 666-3259.