“The festering wound of incontinency, being bad over and over and over and over and over and over again spiraling in imprints of wrongs against God”
— Jasmine Nyende, Riting 🔗
“a critically generative practice” that “relies on the notion that reality can only be reverse engineered”
— Rossen Ventzislavov, X—TRA 🔗
→ "Sorry Atlantis, Eden's Achin' Organ Seeks Revenge", Asher Hartman
“intimate proximity with a rage that no expression can appease”
— Martin Harries, Los Angeles Review of Books 🔗
“Internalized white supremacy, buttressed with ‘an unwillingness to come emotionally clean,’ […] filtered through the devious tricksterism of elves […] The camera brings us so much closer to the performers that the performances acquire the casualness, accessibility and immediacy of confessionals”
— Michael Fox, KQED 🔗
“The frame—whatever it may be—simply cannot contain all the questions, life experience, and language Hartman and his actors jam into it. It fills to overflowing and explodes.”
— Janet Sarbanes, American Theatre 🔗
“Even in this disorienting space, where subjectivity imploded, it was not anxiety or confusion that prevailed but a strange sense of comfort.”
— Pablo José Ramírez, Artforum 🔗
“By refusing to flatten psychic struggle into a mere aesthetic gesture, Hartman brazenly attempts to stage the unstageable. […] Life, as Hartman stages it, is an endless loop of affective drama — hysterical, libidinous, ecstatic, and undetermined”
— Hannah Tishkoff, Artillery 🔗
“Bleached trauma with an outlined stain”
— Jasmine Nyende, Riting 🔗
“a paragon of dramatic inclusivity”
— Rossen Ventzislavov, X—TRA 🔗
“the familiar is not a destination here; it is the point of departure toward an unregulated space of common interest”
— Rossen Ventzislavov, X—TRA 🔗
“There are no tricks in this play, just traps.”
— Catherine Wagley (quoting Rex), LA Weekly 🔗
“the experiential onslaught of an Asher Hartman play doesn’t diminish upon repeats. It grows into something more powerful, the way poetry learned by heart does”
— Neha Choksi, Riting 🔗
“…reflections of unstable identities locked in a struggle for power, whether magical or political.”
— Martha Daghlian, Oregon Arts Watch 🔗
“As Hartman and the Gawdafful National Theatre uncomfortably and self-reflexively merged the scripted and improvisational, ‘The Dope Elf’ transgressed the boundaries of theatrical space and the unspoken ugliness within us all.”
— Genevieve Quick, 48 Hills 🔗
“Hartman offers no answers because none exist, but he succeeds in rearranging what we think we know for sure into a far more critical state of ambiguity.”
— Sue Bell Yank, KCET Artbound 🔗
“It’s the players’ eager virtuosity that reinserts in the haggard form of history an absurd, electric kind of joy.”
— Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, Art in America 🔗
“Great actors are not only great thinkers but accomplished conduits. They allow themselves to be mirrors of the times in which they live and channels to information beyond our usual apprehension.”
— Asher Hartman, in conversation with José Luis Blondet, LACMA Unframed 🔗
→ "The Silver, the Black, the Wicked Dance", Asher Hartman, José Luis Blondet
“Language, in my theater, is the art of the wail, the cracking of dead patter, the once orgasmic vowels, hard ‘r’s of an English that seals out the foreign, even as it calls up its murderous familiars.”
— Asher Hartman, Brooklyn Rail 🔗
“Through the laughter and Whack-A-Mole madness, there was an incredible sadness to the play as Hartman evoked the shadow of AIDS, and our miserable fallen men.”
— Hedi El Khoti, Frieze 🔗
→ "Sorry Atlantis, Eden's Achin' Organ Seeks Revenge", Asher Hartman
“Asher Hartman’s art is located at the intersection of performance, theater, and magic.”
— Alicia Eler, Art21 🔗
“This cannot be a play, only a stuttering ceremonial joke.”
— Nancy Popp 🔗
“Jasmine Orpilla is an aural alchemist, enlisting a junk drawer of sonic devices to expand the sparse black box theater into a wormhole.”
— Dorothy Dubrule 🔗
“Hartman’s work acutely registers the political costs and the violence that attend all the tawdry and grandiloquent rituals with which we strive to maintain the singular self.”
— Martin Harries, The Georgia Review 🔗
