Kelli’s Reviews > By Any Other Name > Status Update

The most extraordinary moment of any show was the hiccup of time between the last line and the applause. It took only a heartbeat for the audience to leave the world of the play to regain footing in this one—but, oh, those seconds were precious. It was the proof that they’d taken a journey; and that they’d come home changed.

Explosives. Opioids. Nuclear weapons. None of them could hold a candle to hope, the most dangerous commodity in the world.

“Hair is fine. Sharpies are fine. Idris Elba is fine. You,” he said, “are delusional.”

The Puritans claimed that if you attended the theater, you would not be able to tell the difference between what was fiction and what was real. A man might look at a boy actor dressed in the clothes of a woman and think him an actual woman. .... Emilia understood the true motivation: a play might make its viewers think. And when people thought, instead of blindly following the Gospel, they escaped from your control.