5. REVIEWS OF HURT McDERMOTT'S PREVIOUS WORK

Excerpts w/links to

full on-line articles, where available:

NIGHTINGALE IN A MUSIC BOX
A feature film
Written & Directed by
Hurt McDermott
WINNER
Best Screenplay, Slamdance X, 2004;
Excellence in Screenwriting,
Brooklyn International Film Festival, 2005;
Best Director, Shriekfest, 2005

San Francisco Chronicle:

 "Nightingale" is terrific. It's a taut little mousetrap of a thriller, with more than a nod to the clever plotting of Hitchcock. It rockets along, one step ahead of the viewer, and creates a tense, edgy mood with a minimum of fuss or special effects.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/chronicle/a/2003/09/28/MO17940.DTL&type=movies

Village Voice:

Freudian notions of the unconscious are put to better use in Nightingale in a Music Box, a taut brainwashing thriller in which a federal agent sifts through an amnesiac's fragmented memories, separating the real from the programmed. Nightingale ... has its screws tightened—director Hurt McDermott is aware of his limitations and more than capable of thriving within them.BEN KENIGSBERG
http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0522,tracking2,64449,20.html

E-Insider Reviews:

“Nightingale In A Music Box” is a film with a lot on its mind—an intricate maze of ideas that are so tightly woven together it overflows with intelligence. It begins and ends methodically in a calculating manner inventing some new word usage along the way to describe a strange process of mind control and, probably, hypnosis. George Orwell might have had this film in his DVD library had such a thing existed in his time.

 Films like “Nightingale” demonstrate that independent thrillers do not need stunts and computer generated action sequences to be thrilling and entertaining.
http://www.einsiders.com/reviews/archives/show_theatrical.php?review_theatricle=64

Senses of Cinema:

Nightingale in a Music Box (Hurt McDermott, 2002). A well-crafted Chinese puzzle, and a sterling example of the class of hermetic, talky mental mysteries of which Mamet's House of Games (1987) is the archetype. The director, who is also a Chicago-based playwright, keeps the pace brisk and the performances cold and Brechtian. Just the way I like 'em.

--Carloss James Chamberlin
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/04/31/slamdance_x.html

Variety.Com

Vet Chicago playwright Hurt McDermott's microbudget first feature goes out on an admirable limb, weaving an intriguing tale of high-tech theft and brainwashing.

SELECT PLAY REVIEWS
WARHAWKS & LINDBERGHS
Joseph Jefferson Citation,
Outstanding New Work, 1999

CHICAGO SUN TIMES:

McDermott's "WarHawks & Lindberghs," which received its world premiere in an exhilarating, brilliantly staged Shattered Globe Theatre production Tuesday night, is a richly layered historical pageant that traces the volatile career of Charles Augustus Lindbergh. In the process, the play also offers a fascinating meditation on notions of heroism, politics, seduction, celebrity, racism and, perhaps most intriguingly of all, fear.
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-4439755.html

BIRDS
WINDY CITY TIMES

Hurt McDermott's adaptation of Aristophanes' text is a delight, its breezily contemporary tone easily comprehended by academics and ignorami alike. Literary allusions ( 'You don't expect me to believe that someone could write an interesting play about The Clouds, do you?' ) abound, side-by-side with casual colloquialisms—'Trying to kill a bird with two stones, huh?'—and flat-out puns ( 'I'd forget my head if it weren't attached to the body politic.' ) .
http://www.wctimes.com/gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=7955

repeat w/Madeline
Variety

McDermott's brilliant and hilarious .... wildly comical dialogue always sounds realistic and plausible
http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117339952.html?categoryid=33&cs=1

Sleepwalker
Chicago Reader
Dreaming, the body remains inert while the mind goes a-roaming, but when one sleepwalks things are the other way around. This simple observation provides one of the clues that the sleepwalker in Hurt McDermott's one-character play discovers, but only after she's somnambulated for several nights through classically Jungian glades. ("I love the woods," she assures us. "But if I were to wake up here, it would scare the hell out of me.") As she shares with us the insights that she will not remember in the morning, the enigma of her nocturnal wanderlust continues to elude her even as she seems to tease us with its meaning.

It would be easy to play McDermott's sleepwalker as the standard-issue neurasthenic of romantic fiction, but Kelley Hazen is too savvy an actress to fall for this, though she travels to every corner of the dank and chilly Cafe Voltaire basement. Instead she opts to have her character discuss symptoms and possible causes with a lucidity that piques our curiosity at every turn and a wryly humorous candor that engages our sensibilities as no amount of weepy hand-wringing could. This matter-of-fact approach to a terrifying phenomenon is what makes our heroine's moment of enlightenment not a grand catharsis but a welcome bit of revelation that we can take with us and use to hurdle the small barriers to everyday happiness so common in our times.
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/sleepwalker/Content?oid=888978