THE LIGHT - Reviews
The Light
By: Loy A. Webb
Directed by: Logan Vaughn
Location: MCC Theatre
Performances: January 23, 2019 - March 17, 2019
New York Magazine - VULTURE
"The play works because Webb, Vaughn, Masden, and Belcher III give us not only ideas and arguments but full, familiar, suffering and striving human beings. They’re working inside a form that has its literalism and its limits, but they’re bringing dimension, tenderness, and the audacity of hope to the task."
https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/theater-rage-and-love-times-3-in-strindberg-and-the-light.html
THE WRAP
"Vaughn delivers such controlled performances from Belcher and Masden that we’re not so much watching them perform as eavesdropping on their scorching dispute."
https://www.thewrap.com/the-light-theater-review-loy-a-webb-brett-kavanaugh-breakup/
New York Stage Review
"Vaughn ably navigates the play’s changing rhythms, which rise and ebb several times, and she cultivates superb performances from her two actors. The play demands its actors to run a rapid gamut of intense emotions from bliss to misery and both Masden and Belcher believably do so with natural ease."
Stage Left
"Genesis explicitly rejects the imposition of having to lead Rashad through a “teachable moment”, insisting that her own humanity and dignity as a woman trump her need to educate men to see and value members of opposite sex as equal human beings. Nevertheless, Ms. Webb’s play is itself a “teachable moment” under the gripping direction of Logan Vaughn. #MeToo was founded by a black woman; “The Light” reclaims it for black women."
Theater Scene
"The Light, developed at Chicago’s The New Colony theater company, is so stunningly directed by Logan Vaughn and acted by McKinley Belcher III (The Royale) and Mandi Masden (Saint Joan and Jitney) that the play doesn’t give the audience time to breathe let alone take their eyes off the stage for a single moment during this tense and fiery two-hander."
http://www.theaterscene.net/plays/offbway-plays/the-light/victor-gluck/
New York Splash Magazines
"Vaughn invests the lovers’ expansive, roiling emotional lives with as much nuance and care as she does Webb’s masterfully shifting tonal landscape. Belcher forcefully, compellingly renders the arc of Rashad’s emotional journey. His is the one which will need to travel the farthest, and though much of his work is inward, the actor never fails to take us along with him. And Masden, who is absolutely riveting as the seemingly unflappable Genesis, peels the essence from her character layer by layer until by the end of the play, she is as wrenchingly familiar and emotionally naked as the violent, systemic corruptions this trenchant, important play forces us to confront."
https://newyork.splashmags.com/index.php/2019/02/11/theater-review-seeing-the-light/#gsc.tab=0
