• Recommend
  • Download
  • Save to Reading List

Recommendations

Recommendations

  • Something Something Theatre:
    20 Oct. 2017
    This all-female six-hander is grounded in history and tradition, steeped in suspense and riddled with wit. It's wonderfully accessible to modern theatre-goers, due largely to McBurnette-Andronicos' finely wrought characters and their universal desires for love, wealth, redemption, a gentle yet meaningful death.
  • Robert Lynn:
    15 Oct. 2017
    The best humor develops not from setups and punchlines, but organically, from character. The deeply drawn, richly developed characters in this play start fast with the character-driven humor and never stop. This one deserves a professional production. Wonderfully engaging, funny, historically educating--an absolute delight.
  • AJ DeLauder:
    13 Aug. 2017
    The Hall of Final Ruin is a wickedly funny trip into Santa Fe, New Mexico during the mid-1800s. The setting of the play is rife with miners, competing armies, pistols, and especially gambling. And the most revered gambler of all is La Tules, our sharp witted protagonist. But Death hangs over La Tules and the stakes are high, for she must prove herself worthy of making the trip through Purgatory with Dona Sebastiana, the puller of the cart to the underworld. An incredible play with strong roles for women and an attention to detail that is second to none!
  • Sean Douglass:
    21 Aug. 2015
    The Hall of Final Ruin is an exquisite, intelligent, and deeply original play that combines history and magical realism to thrilling effect. The world of this play exists at the crossroads of many cultures--Hispanic and white, Catholic and Protestant, local and foreign, living and dead--and McBurnette-Andronicos brings it to vivid life with her layered dialogue and characterization. The ongoing struggles of survival and one-upmanship La Tules faces against her own daughters and even death itself make for consistently engaging plotlines, and the play's good humor girds it with warm humanity under the specter of change and mortality. Highly recommended.
  • Claire Redfield:
    31 Jul. 2015
    The Hall of Final Ruin stretches from the ninth sector of the Large Magellanic Cloud to a small "hijola." It is a play that grapples with the big concepts--love, death, colonialism, and historical memory but with a deft hand that refuses to take itself too seriously and constantly keeps you guessing. Come ready to become fully absorbed in the unique and unpredictable world of 19th century Santa Fe and leave laughing. A beautiful piece!
  • Donna Latham:
    28 Jul. 2015
    The Americans are coming, the Mexicans are leaving, and Death is patiently waiting….
    The Hall of Final Ruin is ripe with theatrical atmosphere. From the opening, when Doña Sebastiana hauls her death cart onstage, the stacks are high, and the audience is perched on the edge of their seats. The pace is quick; the dialogue, both English and Spanish, sizzles. With wicked humor, magical realism, and fierce female characters, the play is at once stylized and historical, with resonance for today’s audiences. Explorations of female identity, religion/morality, and colonialism, as Death hovers. Highly recommended.

Pages