“...Revolting yet thrilling—[Mahinerator] uses language alone to melt your brain.”
“Lieblich’s verbally virtuosic play is an eerily funny, deeply chilling demonstration not simply of the banality of evil, but of its absurdity.”
“I’ve long admired Jerry’s rare lucidity, the way their delving, roving intelligence is so closely attuned to language. I think their eloquence comes in part from this mingling of curiosity and care—their attentiveness to the way that words work, and the way that the production of meaning can so easily be coopted by forces of oppression, fascism, and control.”
“Dizzyingly clever...You’ll develop a case of existential wooziness that brings to mind ‘Vertigo’”
“Lieblich’s trickery is rooted in a deep understanding of what live performance makes possible... Lieblich has managed the ultimate bit of theatrical prestidigitation. Shazam, folks! Out of nowhere, he appears on the scene.”
“The theater became one of the mind and the senses rather than spacial reality. The timbres of the voice moved through space farther than any body or object, the sounds of the words stood there, fat with presence, in the space where my eyes were focused…It was as though I had been given permission to find a ghost within myself.””
“Wonderful…Jerry Lieblich nests his spooky narratives like Russian dolls, deftly enfolding us in the show’s origami structure till we’re sure the dead are all around us.”
“The impressive ache of this show, then, is its structural admission that there might not be any failsafe pathway toward success—or, indeed, that success might not be achievable in the first place.”
“[Lieblich’s] ear is uncannily precise…A fugue on emptiness, a theme-and-variations composition on the meaninglessness of our quest for success…There’s quite a bit of extremely good writing...”
“A dizzying, dazzling theatrical meditation on the slippery nature of identity...The play is a miraculously nimble comedy about existential anxiety, rendered with tenderness to match its precision and insight. ”
“Your Hair Looked Great seeks to act as a curative that will rejigger the way you look at things – yourself, other humans, belief structures – and give you an opportunity to see those things with greater clarity, even if only for a couple of minutes.”
“Tiny Little Band’s Ghost Stories will provide you with darkness and guide you through the shared experience of not knowing, at least for a little while.”
“The play was inspired by philosopher Derek Parfit, who believed identity was not so much a solid core of self, but, as Lieblich put it, “a more complicated process that has to do with all the different little interchangeable parts of you that continue over time. There’s a moment I realized, ‘Oh wow, I actually have control over who I want to be,’ which is very liberating but then also, ‘Okay, then what am I?’ It’s nothing more than that construction I’m building.’””
“I am going on like this not because I’m sentimental but because there’s a sweet spot between an Experience and an Interpretation of an Experience where thoughts haven’t quite fallen into the dryness of System—but Experience has been lifted just slightly out of the daily, ongoing steady rush of sensory input. It is still personal, and particular, but it is also possible to hold in common. It is maybe a kind of Thinking, or maybe a kind of Art.”
“[In their work], there is an inclination to coil the magnitude of the world down the size of a seashell, that is, to approach heavy ideas in really quiet ways.”