The Moors at two venues

Urban Milwaukee reviews Renaissance Theaterworks' The Moors.

Explorative playwright Jen Silverman romps through all sorts of theater styles, literary tastes and feminist attitudes. She casually drops meaningful epigrams into her spinning web of language, but it is the pauses between the snarling tones and the sudden hysterics that carry much of the meaning.

The Moors at the Next Act performance space immediately takes hold of our imaginations about the 1840s era of the Bronte Sisters while crisscrossing the supposed lines between realism and expressionism, the supposed lines between England then and society now, the supposed lines between the acting styles of Bette Davis and the crisp nastiness of Maggie Smith. The dialog has a contemporary flair. [...]

Silverman’s dialog even impishly helps the scene setting – she jokes how every private room in the moors Gothic mansion looks like the main parlor. Set designer Jeffrey D. Kmiec carpets the main space with the oriental rugs of the period while the weedy brush and fog of the moors creep in from the background. Jason Orlenko’s costumes combine gowns in the traditional Bronte period and anamorphic exaggeration as the animals come to life (A purist might argue that the height of some period furniture obstructs the view of some patrons). [...]

There are laughs within The Moors, but there is also a strange horror. This is theater that requires audiences to suspend expectations and journey where the playwright wants us to look. To heck with what books about the well-made play tell students. (Dominique Paul Noth)

While San Francisco Chronicle's Datebook reviews the production of the same play on stage at Berkeley.

Forbidden desire pent up inside puffy skirts and ruffly bodices. Dark manors with endless wings you can’t find your way out of. Attic prisoners, wayward heirs, governesses who burn with secret poetry.

Such motifs are synonymous with the lives and works of the Brontë sisters. But in playwright Jen Silverman’s hands, they’re also juicy fruits ripe for queer reappropriation.

Taut and otherworldly, zany and devastating, “The Moors” might even make you mentally reread “Jane Eyre” to see if you missed how it’s been gay this whole time. That’s how fully envisioned these eerie characters and their “savage” environs are. Silverman’s spinsters, their maid, their pet mastiff and a visiting moorhen all feel true and complete and necessary in the manner of literary figures seemingly long imprinted on your brain, even though you’ve only just met them. As they navigate their love-quadrangle, including with one character who may or may not exist, they make choices that are outrageous yet couldn’t be any other way. (Lily Janiak)

Stay at Home Artist has a story about Miss Wooler.