SOURCE: Upchurch, Michael. “Oh ‘Mercy’! This Production is Full of Emotion.” Seattle Times (13 May 1999).

In the following review, Upchurch critiques a production of A Question of Mercy performed at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle, Washington.

A David Rabe play is like a supple dance done with sharp instruments. Its movement arrests you, even as its scalpel edges threaten you. That, at least, is how A Question of Mercy works in Intiman Theatre's taut, if occasionally overly mannered production.

While Rabe's recurring focus is the extremes of human behavior, those extremes, in his hands, can consist of giddy absurdities as much as unvarnished misery. Sometimes his characters' anguish seems self-imposed, as it did with the willfully nutty Hollywood schemers of Hurlyburly (recently filmed). And sometimes it feels preordained by outward circumstance.

Few would deny that the anguish the protagonists suffer in A Question of Mercy is beyond their control...