"As the 1995-96 season comes to a close, I realize that the most absorbing, mind-changing, and wildly humorous theatrical experiences I had were all in alternative houses. I wish to single out Arden Party's highly imaginative production of the French surrealist 'metaphysical vaudeville' Victor, or Children Take Over; at the Jean Cocteau Rep, Ibsen's mysterious The Lady from the Sea and a stylish Major Barbara; the world premiere of Doug Wright's Quills, an Artaudian comic portrait of the Marquis de Sade staged by Howard Shalwitz, the director of Washington, D.C.'s Woolly Mammoth; Tina Howe's Birth and After Birth at the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia; Xerxes Mehta's flawless production of three minimalist Beckett pieces at UMBC (The Maryland Stage Company); Robert Scanlan's American Repertory Theater production of Beckett's 'television and video poems'; and two perfectly honed productions at the Classic Stage Company: Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and Odon von Horvath's rarely given Don Juan Comes Back from the War."

"Not I is associated in people's minds with two great actresses: Jessica Tandy...and Billie Whitelaw....In Strasbourg, I heard the Beckett scholar Enoch Brater tell Mehta that Wendy Salkind, a resident member since the company s inception, was in no way inferior to Whitelaw. And in this critic's opinion there has never been a better Mouth than Salkind's."

"Terry Cobb's lighting design achieved an immaterial quality. The Reader and Listener (Sam McCready and Michael Stebbins) sat close together, so that they seemed to be flowing into one another. Also, the illusion created by this magic lighting was of seeing them through a gigantic magnifying glass. What was magnified was not merely their almost motionless physical presence, but the moral pain suffered by Beckett himself, the pain of loss."

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