Yosemite - Opening Night

Two days ago Playbill. com published a few more ON STAGE pictures of Yosemite.

Yesterday was the official opening of Daniel Talbott's Off-Boraodway Play. The actors, the playwright and director incited to the Opening Night After Party at Dublin 6 in New York City.

With the photo-sources of GettyImage.com and WireImages.com, photographers: Desiree Navarro and Cindy Ord.

A lot of reviews about Yosemite popped up. Some critics like the play other not. Some say the actors are good but the writing is bad and there are too many open answers.

Take a look:

Variety.com: Yosemite by Marilyn Stasio.

...Erbe brings an ethereal quality to Julie's suicidally depressed persona that makes her attractive, in a spooky kind of way. But the character is too catatonic to play the role of catalyst and kick-start this stalled play into some kind of action. And in the end her main contribution is to show us exactly why her miserable kids are so depressed...

HuffingtonPost.com: Kids try to bury big family secret, in 'Yosemite' by JENNIFER FARRAR.

...By the time hollow-eyed, rambling Mom (Kathryn Erbe) shows up to see how it's going, it's clear why none of them will even look at her at first. Erbe gives a deeply affecting performance as their angry, guilty, loving but despairing mother. Numrich and Erbe have a potent scene where they overlap screaming repeatedly at one another, which is as emotionally draining to watch as it must be to enact.

It's clear that the kids have a terrible foreboding about just why their mother has come to reminisce with them, as she tries to plant happy memories in their minds. The actors have created such believable characters that the audience is numbed by the idea of more sorrow ahead for them.

The crackling dialogue and suspenseful silences are well-paced by Pascal. Raul Abrego's impressive onstage forest, complete with sunken hole full of big rocks and dirt, provides an artful, natural background to Talbott's breathtaking, unnatural human tragedy...

TheaterMania.com: Yosemite by Dan Bacalzo.

...Erbe is never convincing in her character's admittedly overwritten and overwrought speeches. And Julie's arrival onto the scene about midway through the play signals the work's descent into bathos, leading to an overly predictable conclusion that does not have the dramatic impact that was likely intended...

TalkinBroadway.com: Yosemite by Matthew Murray.

...It must be said that this is no way the fault of the performers, all of whom are focused and committed to their portrayals. Numrich, late of War Horse, is excellent at conveying the leaking soul of an emotionally hollowed-out teenager; and Erbe tempers Julie's distant resentment with the proper dose of too-processed brightness. They're believable as both individuals coping with layers of troubles, and a family struggling to understand how to live together, which certainly helps fill in a lot of the gaps in Talbott's writing and in Pascal's pace-challenged staging.

But even the best actors can only do so much. These characters are too sketchy to come alive, and Talbott's one-dimensional view of this family in crisis trumpets its emptiness too loudly for you to care about how they could escape from their hopelessness, and the lack of any richness in the writing means you cannot be elevated by their myriad losses. You're ultimately left feeling exactly what they do: nothing. That's a tough hook on which to hang any play, but it can work when concept, execution, and message unite. They never do, and never even come close, in Yosemite...

BackStage.com: Yosemite by Erik Haagensen.

...The production is undermined by a reliance upon hypernaturalistic acting more suited to the small screen, with both Kathryn Erbe, as Julie, and Libby Woodbridge, as Ruby, hard to understand as they underarticulate and somehow throw lines away in the tiny Rattlestick Playwrights Theater space. Erbe has a couple of moments, such as when Julie suddenly accuses her children of being ungrateful because they don't love her anymore, but otherwise her Julie is awfully small for a woman who has behaved in the ways she has. Woodbridge's Ruby stays too much on a single note of subdued plaintiveness. Noah Galvin can't do much with the largely silent Jer, who has so little to do that we sometimes forget he's there at all...

NewJerseyNewsRoom.com: ‘Yosemite’ studies misery - Kathryn Erbe portrays a sorrowful mom in Daniel Talbott’s new drama by MICHAEL SOMMERS

...If the role of Julie seems underwritten – her dissolution particularly -- the frail intensity of Kathryn Erbe’s pensive portrayal helps to vitalize this grieving character, who represents quite an acting contrast from the self-possessed Detective Alexandra Eames that Erbe plays on “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”...

NYPress.com: Dead and Buried - Rattlestick gives us the rocky Yosemite, about a family and a hole by Mark Peikert.

NewYork.TimeOut.com: Yosemite - Three teens try to bury a family secret by Adam Feldman.

NYDaylyNews.com: Off-Broadway, Daniel Talbott’s ‘Yosemite’ shows a family in deep crisis by Joe Dziemianowicz