2025 Audience Reviews

Company: Tree.Lock//Productions
Show: The Professionals: A Broadcast
Venue: The Southern Theatre

A very human response to our inhuman times

I absolutely loved this show. It was nuanced, ambitious, wise, and brave. I found it beautiful and moving. As this show reminds us, we are not used to questions with no answers, yet that is exactly what this piece provides (which I would argue is art's highest purpose). We live in a time when the pressure to have a concrete answer, an unwavering stance on every issue, is so great our relationships and communities are cracking from it. We also live in a time when there is no distinction between our interior and exterior selves, our professional and personal selves, when it is all content to be exploited for profit--our own or someone else's. This show reflected that reality without judgment or overstatement, and it was all the more suffocating for its subtlety. This piece also resisted that overwhelming pressure--reflected in some of these reviews!--to posit an argument or provide a solution. Instead, this beautiful show offered a gentle, deeply physical, profoundly human response to the mechanization of our every thought. We resist not with more data, not with more "content," not with a tighter argument or a louder, more extreme opinion. Instead, we grieve. We wonder. We learn and we teach and we remember. We dance. We touch. We take turns leading. We breathe together. This show, to me, is what fringe theatre is all about. It wasn't perfectly polished, but it was bold and courageous in its strangeness and subtlety. It didn't try to be more than it was, or do more than art can do in an hour. Perhaps remembering and returning to our smallness, to our everyday human relationships, to our bodies, is the right answer after all.