Striking...rich...charismatic - even seductive - astonishing...and just incidentally, a bout of slapstick paint-splattering goes further than any Clement Greenberg essay in evoking the cultural rage and despair underpinning Jackson Pollack's art.  

Recommended and Short Listed! -Tony Adler,  Chicago Reader 

A colorful new Avant-Garde romp:  Ruth Margraff's Anger/Fly stays true to the juxtaposition of the absurd and the banal.  An orgy of paint, sex, and violence covers the stage. The nine-person cast engenders rapt attention through their captivating performances...charismatic...hypnotic...The production is dazzling...Anger/Fly will engage you almost to surfeit.  

 Recommended! -Keith Glab, Chicago Theater Beat 

Raucous, challenging, giddy...when Ruth Margraff opens her new play, inspired by Ionesco's La Colère, with an upbeat a cappella tune and a town full of fresh-faced churchgoers sporting ear-to-ear grins, you can bet your Sunday bonnet there'll be some hell to pay by the end.  Tramp Antonio Brunetti dissects marriages, class hierarchies and social contracts from the fringe of his blissfully ignorant, well-to-do fellow townsfolk as they scapegoat and conform themselves to their own demise... with bubble blowers, expressionist gestures and a candy-colored kaleidoscope orgy. Critic's Pick and Story of the Week -Dan Jakes, 

Time Out Chicago

 Theater of the absurd isn't just about delivering farce, which "Anger/Fly" has in spades, but also about representing the meaningless banality of social life through a combination of horror, hopelessness and gallows-humor comedy. Trap Door's masterful take on what this kind of theater can do and be now begins with a premise from a short Ionesco scenario for a film...From this absurdist germ, playwright Ruth Margraff...adapted a complex theater piece, with highly-stylized aesthetics, a pastiche of cultural references, and the best Brechtian rendition of "Sugar Sugar" you're likely to hear in a black box theater...If the show sounds dark, it is...but it's also extremely funny, thanks in large part to the actors' silent-film-style intensity and deftness at rapidly oscillating between comedy and deadly seriousness. Incisive political themes are lightened by the presence of an apocalyptic paint-splashing war, striking expressionistic choreography and sound design and, most of all, by the writing itself. Margraff's enlivened the diegesis with both very funny one-liners and poetic, solemn monologues that, delivered intensely by actors covered in paint, underscore the bravery of a show that takes risks-and takes this brand of theater seriously. Recommended! - Monica Westin, New City Stage

There is enormous fun to be had here.  Mike Mroch's all-white set brings to mind the cabinet-door prankishness of "Laugh-In," and pop songs give the show an off-kilter sensibility. The impossibly tall David Steiger delivers a lanky, witty, furrowed-brow of a performance that is at once goofy and enigmatic and you can't take your eyes off of him. He is well-matched with Tiffany Bedwell as his wife, who wears a perpetually bright, perky, Teflon smile - until she doesn't. It's a gas watching them. -Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune