“to ask an artist how they feel about a critic is like asking a lamppost how they feel about a dog” Joachim Trier

LUCY (at The Minetta Lane)

“Written and directed by Erica Schmidt, LUCY is seamlessly layered, extraordinarily entertaining and tricky to classify. A cleverly detailed exploration of child care as both a kind of labor and a primal instinct, it is a workplace comedy set at home, where boundaries are porous and personal stakes are exceedingly high. … Lucy is also an irresistible, engrossing slow burn as tension between the two women builds under pressure. Laughs increasingly double as sighs of relief as the suspense of discovery escalates through the show’s taut two hour running time. … Schmidt who recently adapted Cyrano into a stage musical and whose MacBeth recast Shakespearean tragedy among vicious high schoolers, has a way of uncovering and magnifying the profundity simmering underneath everyday conflict. On the surface, LUCY is a tug-of-war between opposing personalities. At its core, LUCY confronts questions of power, possibility, and human nature. Schmidt’s staging is a crisply orchestrated slice of Manhattan life, impeccably designed to reveal her precisely drawn characters. … LUCY is also a kind of inventory of the roles women are expected to play, whether they become mothers or not and the systems that assign values to them accordingly. That draws even more attention to the fact that Bloom and Collins hardly seem to be playing roles at all; the actors are so thoroughly committed and convincing that any hint that things may not be as they seem feels all the more destabilizing. It’s the sort of feeling that might arise after trusting your life to someone else’s hands and then realizing they’re a total stranger.”

—CRITICS PICK Naveen Kumar The New York Times

“The tense, unspoken judgment that flows between the two women is the best aspect of Erica Schmidt’s dark comedy… The play sends up the absurd expectations of motherhood and childcare, especially in the fishbowl of Manhattan.” —New York Magazine

“One of the best plays of the season! A gorgeously rendered story.” —This Week in New York

Cyrano (at The Goodspeed and New Group)

“A lush, moving and emotionally rich story of longing, love and acceptance.” -Cary Darling, Houston Chronicle

“With a haunting score, meditative musical of longing and desire, this adaptation makes many smart edits and rewrites to move the story along and reduce it’s period preciousness: the attitude is deliberately contemporary.” -Variety, Frank Rizzo

“The music is lovely, moody, evocative and all of a piece, just right for this more modern feel of the play. And no, it’s not about the nose. What this production gets right is how it cuts to the heart of the matter. As the adapter, Schmidt has done some marvelous editing, and distilling  scenes and cutting to their most human essence. The first act flies by and the entire show clocks in at just two hours. In a play that is so full of posturing, speechifying, melodrama and sentiment -- which audiences have lapped up for more than a century -- this version has a fresh, natural, even contemporary feel. That's also reflected in the music by Aaron Dessner, Bryce Dessner and lyrics by Matt Berninger and Caron Besser. There's an elemental quality to the show that I found exhilarating. Even the time period in which the work is set is  bracingly off-center, sometimes traditional yet also modern.” -Showriz, My Own Take

MacBeth (at the Lucille Lortel and HTP)

“Erica Schmidt’s…exuberant [MAC BETH] finds common cause between rebellious teenagers and bloody-minded Shakespeare. …an adaptation of the Shakespeare play that with its all-female cast becomes a raucous, sometimes impish, very dark-edged revel.” —CRITICS PICK The New York Times

“…Schmidt has done a rare and wonderful thing—she has adapted a well known play—perhaps the best known play ever—in a way that illuminates rather than exploits. …MAC BETH is a daring lens through which to revisit Shakespeare’s dark tale of choice and consequence. Schmidt handles the material beautifully.” -FrontRowCenter. com

“…Schmidt’s adaptation is based on a real murder and attempted murder perpetrated by two 12-year-old girls that left a third with 19 stab wounds.…Transposing Macbeth into MAC BETH comments on both. It shocks, chills, jolts.” —TheaterPizzazz.com

Richard II (at The Old Globe Theater)

“The majestic inaugural play of Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of histories resonates deeply with Shakespeare’s career-long obsession with identity and role-playing, particularly in the figure of a king. Erica Schmidt’s staging of King Richard II for the Old Globe vividly communicated this while maintaining Shakespeare’s uneasy ambivalence about royal figures and the nature of power in Richard II. ….

Schmidt’s Richard II demonstrates the potential for directors to stage plays with which the public is less familiar and to do it with a compelling creative vision that does not have to be spectacular or bombastic to reach its audience. ….

Schmidt’s Richard II certainly was well-suited to the zeitgeist, as we ourselves are in the midst of a political upheaval led by a brazen populist who resides at the zenith of the “aristocratic” chain of being in the United States. As loud as politics are these days, it is refreshing to see a play that takes its time, that dares to admit the compromised, ambivalent nature of rival political factions, not resorting to cartoonish behavior or sound bites, and embrace the complexities of power and human life. …

I am unequivocally in favor of theater experiences that wrap us in hushed beauty as we sit and hear sad stories about dead kings that inspire us to meditate on our own.” - Melissa Croteau Shakespeare Bulletin, Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2018

All The Fine Boys (The New Group)

“The play comes most alive in the beautifully drawn scenes between Emily and Adam, an adolescent philosopher in vibrant intellectual and creative bloom. To Adam, living is a grand experiment –an exuberant trying-on of attitudes, ideas and dreamy affectations. That’s part of what being adolescent is, and Emily and Jenny have those same inclinations. But the girls are far more constricted. In Adam’s full embrace of life, he boasts to anyone who will listen about his sexual experiences, while Emily, a virgin, gets prank calls from people telling her she’s a slut – a judgment based, it seems, on the size of her chest. The play makes clear, that the label can land on girls for the way they look or dress or even eat. Appetites that are celebrated in boys and men can be punished in girls and women. And as any horror film could tell you, the undeserved penalty can be gruesome indeed.”

-The New York Times, Laura Collins-Hughes

“there’s a stinging authenticity to their awkward interactions that’s alternately hilarious and horrifying” -Time Out New York, Raven Snook

“the play is ultimately both distressing and thought-provoking, since Schmidt does not hesitate to raise uncomfortable questions about responsibility and sexuality” - The New Yorker

Uncle Vanya

“A Chekhov production demands a balancing act: Despair and levity have to coexist, just like symbolism and psychological realism, or else part of the play’s richness will be lost. In her staging of Uncle Vanya at Bard Summerscape, director Erica Schmidt, aided by a sterling team of creatives, gets the balance right.”

- Variety

“Erica Schmidt exploits the set’s expanse and the character’s awkwardness, confusion, or drunkenness to introduce long pauses or draw out a simple action to extreme length. This is not the ambiguous, multivalent pause; it rather expresses the character’s rooted despair and the futility of their situation. There is no way out for any of them. Nothing can change for them. They wander through the space like ghosts, seemingly meeting only tangentially, drawn to each other by some desire, attraction, or passion. None of these feelings overcomes anyone’s isolation or loneliness. While in Schmidt’s view most of the character’s possess a certain inner warmth and attractiveness, the overall mood of her production has the numbing chill of ice cold vodka. I mean this as praise of course. In fact, there is never a dull minute, and effortlessly so: the overall mood of despair is constantly enlivened by flashes of emotion, wit and moral revelations and turnabouts. There is not only an eloquent art to the timing and rhythm of these movements and encounters but Erica Schmidt manages the mood and expression of the interchanges among her actors to perfection, revealing a sensitive ear for up to date translation”. -The Berkshire Review

Humor Abuse off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club

“The show, directed by Erica Schmidt (who co-wrote), weaves confessional passages, accompanied by scrapbook photos, with reenactments of old routines, drawing a poignant contrast between the Zen-like confidence required by a clown and the quiet vulnerability of a boy with a distant dad” -The New Yorker

Carnival at The Papermill Playhouse

“I have thought highly of Ms Schmidt’s imaginatively daring productions in the past, and was not let down by her here. She has taken this story of a third-rate traveling circus – which in itself is about the creation of theatrical magic- and made it weirdly, miraculously adult. Ms Schmidt has staged the show in an empty space, taking the setting to the back wall and loading dock of the stage itself. The wonderful dreamy opening begins with a lone figure seated on the apron of the bare stage, playing a concertina. He plays the show’s lilting theme song – “Love Makes The World Go Round” – until a Felliniesque parade of shabby troubadours enters like eternal strolling players. Some look weary; some are no longer young. They have come to town to set up their booths and sideshows.” …. “There are sublime moments when we see astonishing things, and then hovering giddily between reality and dreams CARNIVAL! achieves the miraculous”

-John Heilpern The New York Observor

“This CARNIVAL! Isn’t just another revival; it’s a strong director’s strikingly original and perhaps controversial vision of the award-winning musical. This is unquestionably Erica Schmidt’s CARNVIAL.” “This production is if not a masterpiece, clearly a work of art”

-The Item, Thom Molyneaux

Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land

“The director Erica Schmidt elicits beguiling portrayals from the appealing cast” … “If you think yourself immune to Copland in his Americana mode, just try listening to this winning cast in the hymnal quintet “The Promise Of Living” and see if you don’t get misty-eyed.”

-The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini

A Month In The Country off-Broadway at Classic Stage Company

“Erica Schmidt’s attractive production hits the right notes of comedy and muted anguish. It’s a pleasure to see Taylor Schilling and Peter Dinklage, on loan from prestige television, show their range.” -The New Yorker

Imaginary Invalid

“Director Erica Schmidt’s production begins with the actors performing a celebratory song, and it’s entirely well-deserved. While this broadly comic rendition skirts the edges of camp, it somehow all works.

Dinklage plays Toinette, the wily maid of hypochondriac extraordinaire Argan (Ethan Phillips, in the role that Molière himself first played before suffering an onstage hemorrhage and dying hours later), who when first seen is disputing the price of his most recent enema.

The play — here efficiently streamlined to an intermission-free 100 minutes — concerns Argan’s plan to marry off his daughter Angelique (Preston Sadleir) to a doltish doctor (Henry Vick) rather than the handsome young Cléante (Danny Binstock) with whom she’s desperately in love. He’s purely motivated by self-interest, explaining that he wants “a son-in-law who’s useful for me.”

The feisty Toinette attempts to undermine his plans via a variety of duplicitous means, including, in one hilarious scene, posing as a traveling doctor whose one-word diagnosis for all of Argan’s imagined ailments is “Lungs.”

Director Schmidt — who previously collaborated with her husband, Dinklage, on an acclaimed “Uncle Vanya” — has assembled a first-rate ensemble whose wildly entertaining turns and drag posturing contribute to the riotous artifice.

Adding to the fun are Laura Jellinek’s clever, two-tiered set design — most of the action occurs on an elevated platform, while the audience, sitting on either side, can peer below as the characters engage in silent activities underneath — and Andrea Lauer’s amusing period costumes, including one hot-pink dress worn by Argan’s scheming wife (Zachary Booth) that resembles a pastry confection gone awry.

Speaking of confections, let’s hope that this delicious theatrical one being presented at Bard College’s SummerScape finds a way to transfer to New York City after its all-too-brief upstate run.” -The New York Post , Frank Scheck

“Part of the beauty of this Invalid is the fluency with which Schmidt marries period detail with contemporary intonations.”

-Financial Times, Brendan Lemon

“a spa vacation in the form of Erica Schmidt’s refreshing ice-cube-down-your-back-her all-male version of Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid.”

-Time Out New York, Helen Shaw

“By turns outrageously funny and unexpectedly moving, the production startles from the moment you enter the theater.” … “Erica Schmidt’s free-wheeling, all male production … works breezily” -Business Week, Jeremy Gerard

Debbie Does Dallas off Broadway at the Jane Street Theatre

“Debbie Does Dallas, the cheerfully raunchy stage version is shamelessly silly, shrewdly and smugly self aware, proud of being naughty”

-The New York Times, Bruce Weber

“Dear Erica Schmidt,

You don’t know me, but I wanted to tell you how very gifted you are. Let me firstly say that any young director at the start of her career who can stage As You Like It as wittily as you and the recent Debbie Does Dallas is absolutely the director for me. All shows are the same shows in the impure essentials. What was within your terrific Debbie –fun, speed discipline, sex, identity problems- is found within the double and triple identities, the comedy and farce of sexual roles, the heaven and hell of love, of your As You Like It at The Public. I see you also designed the costumes for the Shakespeare and adapted Debbie from the hallowed original movie. Keep going, whatever you do. We’re on your side.” -John Heilpern, The New York Observer May 5th, 2003

As You Like It (moved from a parking lot to The Public Theater)

“As she did with Romeo and Juliet, Erica Schmidt, the director, stamps such a distinctive shape on this presentation and gives it such sharp rhythm that it feels much more like a good-humored tribute to Shakespeare than in invasion of him, especially as the actors speak with gratifying clarity and precision the lines that haven’t been pruned.” -The New York Times, D.J.R Bruckner, October 24th 2000