"I now call it the UMBC miracle...a masterpiece of intellectual conceptualization and flawless theater craft. Every spring I travel from New York to Baltimore in order to immerse myself in the kind of work I admire in Europe...."

"The supreme acting achievement of this production is Sam McCready's, a professional actor since the age of 12 in his native Ireland. A member of the Maryland Stage Company since its inception, McCready was most recently a deeply moving Lear and a comically tyrannical Alceste. Like all fine actors, he changes from role to role, but in The Duchess of Malfi, as Bosola, he is constantly shifting, putting on disguises, hiding himself and coming out into the open, the perfect faceless spy. And yet he is also capable of emotions, of pitying and even loving."

"The Duchess [is] gloriously played by the company's chief actress, the immensely versatile Wendy Salkind."

"Assisted by the company's superb designer (Elena Zlotescu), the director creates a nightmarish vision. Issuing from deepest darkness ghosts materialize, skeletons spewing from the graveyards of the earth. These black-clad, hooded figures are nothing but grinning skulls, and long, filament-like fingers. They are led by a horseman (the masked Bosola) riding the metal skeleton of a dead horse."

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