One of the Open Theater's biggest successes was Ms. Yankowitz's 1969 meditation on death. In its updated version, (the play) is an alternately harrowing and humorous examination of how we embark on our final journey.  Woven through it is Ms. Yankowitz's text, which is often poetic and always startling, in scenes that range from a final interview (including the ultimate question, "Mahogany or pine?") to a lecture on forensics and embalming to a Last Judgment.  The piece is frequently funny and sometimes breathtaking, but always engaging.

Available through the Performing Arts Journal


Terminal (original version)

Kroll, Newsweek

"Terminal sends its audience away with a passion for preserving the gift of life:  its gorgeous variety, its possibilities, its essential sweetness.”  John Lahr, New York Times

“…the closest thing we have to the transcendently didactic theater of the ancient Greeks.”

(In) her trenchant, brutal play, Susan Yankowitz reveals the many colors of pain and the ripple effect of violence -- on friends and family of the perpetrators. In a time-shifting sequence of snapshots, she assembles a collage of images, the portrait of a culture that has spawned youths without moral core or conscience.  We watch in horror as the parents of 25 year-old Donald Holt try to sort it all out.  In the end, we as a society are left with the same questions these parents ask ove rand over: Who are we and what have we wrought? This Sledgehammer Theatre production is a magnificent marriage of substance, style and form, melding Yankowitz's scorching scenes and dialogue, Kirsten Brandt's stark, sizzling direction, Paul Peterson's vivid sound and David LeeCuthbert's breathtaking, lighting which, like the play itself, both illuminatesand obscures.  Every piece of theater should be like this 'Knife in the Heart'-- a brilliant collaborative effort that forces us to examine who and what we are.
--Pat Launer, KPBS-FM, NPR




THEATRE REVIEW: “A KNIFE IN THE HEART”

At the Sledgehammer Theatre
KPBS Airdate: November 08, 2002


Emotional intensity slices through the air with short, sharp strokes. The silence is palpable. Onstage, in a series of brief scenes, we witness horror, anguish, grief, despair. The pain of parents raising a child. They try to love him, nurture him, understand him. And then, one unforgettable day, their lives become a wreckage, when they learn that their sweet, silent, violin-playing son is really a monster. He dispassionately murdered three people, one of them the governor of the state, slashing his way to notoriety. Trying to be significant, noticed, televised. "A Knife in the Heart" was inspired by the rash of killings and crimes committed by troubled but impassive young men who show no empathy, no remorse. In the West coast premiere of her trenchant, brutal play, Susan Yankowitz reveals the many colors of pain and the ripple effect of violence -- on friends and family of the perpetrators. Yankowitz, a veteran of the renowned Open Theatre, worked experimentally with legendary theatermaker Joseph Chaikin. Here, in a time-shifting sequence of snapshots, she assembles a collage of images, the portrait of a culture that has spawned youths without moral core or conscience. We watch in horror as the parents of 25 year-old Donald Holt try to sort it all out. Where and why did it all go wrong?

In our society, the biggest burden, for child-care and ultimate responsibility, falls on the mother, whose "every breath" in this play "is like a knife in the heart." We witness psychiatric and legal interrogations, parental anger and mutual disgust, courtroom pleas and verdicts, and, along with the youth who seems to move through it all, serene and detached, we meet a young girl who's turned on by his swashbuckling acts, willing to risk all to see him and love him. Something is very very wrong, and neither shrinks nor parents nor playwrights have the answer. In the end, we as a society are left with the same questions these parents ask over and over: Who are we and what have we wrought?

This Sledgehammer Theatre production is a magnificent marriage of substance, style and form, melding Yankowitz's scorching scenes and dialogue, Kirsten Brandt's stark, sizzling direction, Paul Peterson's vivid sound and David Lee Cuthbert's breathtaking, lighting which, like the play itself, both illuminates and obscures. The ensemble is outstanding, with knockout performances by David Stanbra as young Donald, Laura Lee Juliano as the girl who adores him, William Todd Tressler as the hapless father, and most of all, Rosina Reynolds, riveting, flawless, gut-wrenching, pitch-perfect as the tormented mother. Every piece of theater should be like this 'Knife in the Heart' -- a brilliant collaborative effort that forces us to examine who and what we are.




'Knife' cuts to the core of emotion
 By Anne Marie Welsh

Beautiful is not your usual description of a Sledgehammer show. "Raw" and "edgy" tend to be the right adjectives, along with "original," and, lately, "unfinished." Yet beautiful does describe Sledge artistic director Kirsten Brandt's startling and restrained production of "A Knife in the Heart." Smartly cast and exquisitely lighted by David Lee Cuthbert, with a ravishing sound score by Paul Peterson, this complex yet fluent staging is a breakthrough for Brandt, a talented young director at 29. She's been struggling to find or create congenial material since she took over the artistic direction of the theater nearly three years ago.

The subject matter of Susan Yankowitz's play jibes with the theater company's tradition, for "Knife," which opened over the weekend, confronts violent murder. Like a prism turned in the light, it reflects the causes and consequences of a well-brought-up young man killing a state governor and several bystanders, apparently just to get attention.

Yankowitz's script is anything but a cultural soap opera, however. Shrewdly, she layers in humorous scenes, and subtle satire. It never reduces motive, nor simplifies the familial and social fallout. In fact, we leave this production still not believing that Donald Holt (David Stanbra), an aspiring violinist, a so-so student, a witty sort of loner, was actually capable of the crime. He's like most youngsters –– and even such adults as fastidious David Westerfield –– in the expanding gallery of killers making headlines recently. He planned it rationally. He got something emotionally from the act. And he left his family and friends, not to mention the victims' families, devastated. The style of the plotless presentation is influenced by Yankowitz's long association with the seminal avant-garde director Joe Chaikin. Yankowitz and Brandt fuse the actors' language and their physicality to simple stage imagery, music and lighting with an artful delicacy, clarity and precision of feeling.

The emphasis, however, is not on Donald, but on his mother, played with quiet passion and numbed disbelief by Rosina Reynolds. We see her first in a wordless posture of anguish, and as the short scenes occur, folding in more information, the action often lifts to these images beyond the power of words. Instead of a linear plot, "A Knife in the Heart" is a drama of accumulation, the picture enlarging and completing itself over time. That's part of this play's provocation, however. In its careful, undemanding way, "A Knife in the Heart" makes us look squarely at the inexplicable.   It leads, as the best art does, not to explanation or outrage, but to contemplation.