WHY TORTURE IS WRONG, AND THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEM: 100% Sweet – UPDATED

Photo by Rick Baumgartner

SWEET
Durang is getting a lot off his chest, and off ours. The laughter he generates is from nonsense about nonsense, unnervingly true and cathartic, and beautifully performed.
Steven Leigh Morris – LA Weekly

SWEET
At this point the play takes a surprising twist and justifies your having sat for nearly two hours wondering where this play was going. Durang provides a satisfying ending to all the extreme subplots and director Daniel Henning has steered his players out of the morass and brought them to a finely tuned and well-acted denouement.
Cynthia Citron – Reviewplays

SWEET
Christopher Durang, master of neurotic urban self-involvement, brings his A game and A+ notion of citizenship to “Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them,” a title whose grammatical wackiness is of a piece with the loopy take on America in global terrorism’s clutches. Daniel Henning’s L.A. premiere production for the Blank Theater Company falls short in its central characters, but otherwise admirably embodies the distinctive Durangian universe to keep an audience laughing in the playhouse and thinking on its way home.
Bob Verini – Variety

SWEET
This is the sort of comedy that asks us to laugh at severed body parts and make light of terrifying global woes that threaten the survival of mankind. Durang succeeds in making the grotesque funny through his anarchic approach to our typical notions of drama, creating a cartoonlike milieu. The spirited cast is up to the zany high jinks, particularly Genovese’s self-righteous lunatic, Estabrook’s Martha Stewart on speed, and Malhotra’s gleefully oblivious loose cannon. Seehorn brings a perfect deadpan to her damsel in distress, and Catherine Hicks garners guffaws as Leonard’s right-wing accomplice. Nicholas Brendon is a laugh riot in the role of an erstwhile minister who doubles as a porn producer, and droll Alec Mapa shines in multiple roles, including a deranged spy prone to emulating “Looney Tunes” voices. Design elements are solid, and Henning’s approach to the shenanigans is fast, furious, and unfailingly hilarious.
Les Spindle – Backstage

SWEET
Daniel Henning continues his quest to make The Blank Theatre Company Hollywood’s first regional theater with the west coast premiere of Christopher Durang’s Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them. With a superb cast, an inventive production design and Durang’s timely and on-the-nose satire, he and the Blank have taken another big step in that direction.
D. Jette – LA Theatre Review

SWEET
Not that the physical staging obstructs momentum — Jeff G. Rack’s sets lend themselves to quick rearrangements, and Michael Mullen’s costumes have giddy flair. Yet too often the sense is of a farce being conscientiously served rather than breathlessly dreamed up in an orgy of satiric illogic. Still, the play hits the bull’s-eye enough times to make your giggles stick in the back of your throat.
Charles McNulty – LA Times

SWEET
As dark as Why Torture Is Wrong … can get (and that’s pretty dark indeed), playwright Durang ultimately proves himself a romantic of the first order. Some may feel the ending is an easy (and even unfair) way out of the hole he’s dug himself into. Not this reviewer. I loved every second of the last five or ten minutes every bit as much as the two hours or so that preceded. Delightfully original, Why Torture Is Wrong, And The People Who Love Them is just what doctor ordered for Huffington Post readers in the mood for an fresh-from-the-headlines evening of theater … and gazillion laughs to boot.
Steven Stanley – StageSceneLA

SWEET
If you haven’t guessed yet, we are inside the deliciously cockeyed brain of one of the American theater’s national treasures, Christopher Durang, who stubbornly insists that farce and satire are alive and kicking and whose newest play Why Torture Is Wrong, And The People Who Love Them is all the proof you need that he couldn’t be more right. And not only is it alive and kicking, but it is precisely the cure-all for the malaise that has spread like wildfire around us in the past decade.
Harvey Perr – Stage and Cinema

SWEET
“Torture,” simply, is just a lot of fun.
Michael Sheehan – OnStageLosAngeles

SWEET
Directed by Henning for the Blank Theatre Co.,the unwieldy titled Why Torture is Wrong, and the People who Love Them is a giddy romp through notions of love, paranoia and reality not necessarily in that order. Durang’s wacked-out take on terrorism and the ways in which we deal with same is nothing short of demented and Henning’s company embrace the beast with drawer dropping, Elmer Fudd-aping, zonked out zeal as necessity dictates. The evening’s a riot and occasionally a thinker as well.
Evan Henerson – CurtainUp

SWEET
This rollicking, outrageous production offers a farcical send-up of every imaginable meme of the first decade of the twenty-first century: illegal and violent detention and torture, racial profiling (“I’m not Arab, I’m Irish!”), and the alleged existence of a string-pulling shadow government, all in the name of homeland security. Throw in an outrageous commentary on the state of contemporary theatre, a swipe at our shallow cultural values, the prospect for romance and, oddly, unexpectedly, a glimmer of redemption at the end and you’ve got ample evidence that Durang is our Ziegfeld of the zeitgeist.
James Scarborough – What the Butler Saw