Olney Theatre Center creative manager Jason Loewith says Oil is on par with the greatest works of this century. Luckily, the 21st century is only nineteen years in, then hopefully the side by side 81 will set the bar a trivial college.

Ella Hickson's Oil approaches complex themes of industrialism, imperialism and family. The play tirelessly condemns the world's obsession with and waste product of oil through metaphor. And metaphor. And metaphor, metaphor, metaphor. An absurd corporeality of which are chicken-themed, by the way.

Oil feels a flake like a 10th grader who has suddenly discovered that imperialism is bad and is nigh to make their whole class listen to them deed it out past pretending to eat chicken to represent the gluttony of the oil industry. The play is clever, only not quite clever enough to tie information technology together with the magic that political theater is more than than capable of achieving.

A play can be magical. It can describe you in deep and make you desire to stay forever — and it can achieve this while delivering a bold message that confronts the issues of the time. Call back Big White Fog past Theodore Ward or The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window by Lorraine Hansberry. There is no need to choose between being intellectual and being interesting on the stage.

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The saving grace of this production — directed past Tracy Brigden — is Megan Graves, who plays Amy. When she first comes on stage in the second human action, Amy is an 8-twelvemonth-quondam, and Graves plays her so convincingly that I wanted to know where this kid actress came from. In her side by side scene, unbeknownst to me, she is fifteen, which I suddenly discovered when she receives oral sex on phase within the first few minutes. What I idea was a law-breaking turned out to exist a very talented adult actress who convinced the unabridged room she was a kid, then a teenager, then an adult woman.

Graves took the script and recreated the lived experience of a daughter and her contentious-yet-irreplaceable relationship with her mother. The only time I wasn't truly waiting for the bear witness to be over was when Graves was on phase.

In that location is a lot to exist said about the nature of Amy's human relationship with her mother, May. The propellant of the playlets through space and fourth dimension, prepare across unlike eras instead of being purely chronological, gives depth to the characters, who retain their identities throughout.

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As the play takes on the generational issues of repeating the sins of our past and trying to merits our own identities, the human relationship played out on phase is a microcosm for generational strife. The repetition of the mothers' and daughters' actions — pretentious and boring, but still clearly representative of something — shows two generations that are the same, who want the aforementioned things, but cannot stand back to realize it. What are May and Amy besides the same name with rearranged letters, anyhow?

This play leaves a lot to discuss, like what a future without oil would expect like and what choices a mother will make for her daughter, but it also leaves the audition chatting about the bad Cornish accents and a certain interpretive trip the light fantastic toe sex activity scene.

Oil proves that y'all tin can exist thought-provoking without being good. At that place is a lot to unpack on stage, but very little of it will be well-nigh how much you lot enjoyed the play.