Photo: Thurn Hoffman. Credit: Ellen Sandifer Photography.

SWEET
Shepard’s surreal fable is a good fit for the Moth Theatre’s focus on Jungian psychology and dream channeling. Aside from Hoffman’s menacing Doctor, however, the young ensemble lacks the seasoning needed for finely tuned tension building. But director Jamie Wollrab’s staging gets stronger as events become increasingly weirder, and his feel for the darkly comic is spot-on — especially when Shepard debunks his heroic Western mythology even as he obsesses over it.
Philip Brandes – LA Times

BITTER
Essentially a seduction-of-the-artist allegory embroidered by a pastiche of plot and character archetypes from vintage Warner Bros. gangster melodramas, Shepard’s surrealist aims — along with their intended laughs — are all but lost in Wollrab’s realistic mise-en-scène and some wildly uneven performances.
Bill Raden – LA Weekly

BITTERSWEET
Director Jamie Wollrab and his obviously promising company of eager young players grab hold of this little piece of Shepard and hang on for dear life. And the effort must be applauded, especially for their willingness to go to the gritty, bizarrely improbable places this play leads them. The significant word here, however, is “young,” and Wollrab’s cast is almost uniformly too short-in-tooth to play these men—people who have lived disappointing lives long enough to find themselves where they’ve landed in their downward-spiraling existences. Although Cody and three other brief characters are played age-appropriately, his lowlife band of kidnappers are not, leaving the viewer with the feeling of watching a scene performed in a college acting workshop—albeit a very good one.
Travis Michael Holder – Backstage

SWEET
Thus, the thematic search for roots in a senseless world meanders and reappears in even more guises. Rebelling against the predominate well-made plays of the early 60s, Shepard’s writing resists structure, and Moth Theatre director Jamie Wollrab echoes this mandate with a “blockless” technique that asks the actors to create their own stage pictures in order to preserve the integrity of their dramatic truths. For the most part, the technique works. There is only one spot at the end of act two when actors bunch up on one side of the stage to do some major damage to each other in Shepard’s explosive ending. But its hard to mess up a stage picture that features the main character chained to a bed at stage center.
Leigh Kennicott – Stagehappenings

SWEET
The beauty of Horse Dreamer is that Wollrab has been able to corral the cast and their dreams into a solid production, a little mumbly (on stage is not on camera) and over the top at times (loud and mean can sometimes be low and intense) but the company’s efforts pay off.
Michael Sheehan – OnStageLosAngeles