Nice Fish

67/100

Photo by Teddy Wolf
Written by Louis Jenkins and Mark Rylance. Directed by Claire Van Kampen. At St. Ann's Warehouse Through March 27

What's it About? "On a frozen Minnesota lake, the ice is beginning to creak and groan. It’s the end of the fishing season, and two men are out on the ice angling for answers to life’s larger questions. One of these men is hilariously wrought by TONY Award-winner and Academy Award-nominee Mark Rylance, who co-wrote the play — his first — with the American poet Louis Jenkins. Rylance and Jenkins have adapted Nice Fish with the same wry, surreal quality of Jenkins’ prose poems. Minnesota Monthly called an original version of the play “inexplicable and utterly beautiful.” This newly produced version of Nice Fish comes to St. Ann’s directly from Cambridge’s A.R.T."

Consensus: Unsurprisingly, critics cannot get enough of Mark Rylance, with virtually every critic citing his performance as being the strongest element of the show (along with the expansive set). Critics are more mixed on the show, which is centered around verbal recitations of poetry, with some saying that it lacks the necessary profundity to make the poetry worthwhile while others say that for sheer fun the show is completely worth it. Very few made the case for the show being anything other than cute, however, and it seems like the primary draw for this is the ability to see Rylance on stage.


Variety 87/100
(Marilyn Stasio) "And the show ends with a coup de theatre that is pure surreal pleasure. But it’s Jenkins’ poetry — that laconic voice, extending provocative thoughts and unexpected insights — that hangs in the air at the end of the show."

The New York Times 80/100
(Charles Isherwood) "A few of the more whimsical moments in “Nice Fish” left me, um, cold. But if one scene doesn’t grab you, you’re quickly on to the next. And Mr. Jenkins’s language, moving like the flowing of a river through both the shallows and the depths, has a lightness of touch even when it is at its most plainly philosophical."

Time Out New York 80/100
(David Cote) "It’s all vaguely Waiting for Godot–ish, and Jenkins makes a modest bid as a flyover-state Samuel Beckett. Generally, though, the ultimate lure is a chance to see a great actor like Rylance cutting loose."

Deadline 80/100
(Jeremy Gerard) "Either way, the result is entertainment of an extremely high order: this is the kind of play that gives situation comedy its good name."

The Hollywood Reporter 75/100
(Frank Scheck) "Nice Fish is certainly disjointed and rambling, and its slow pace could provoke irritation among the less patient. But its whimsical observational humor is consistently amusing, and the performers deliver the poetry with unforced naturalness."

Vulture 70/100
(Jesse Green) "That’s the saving grace here. What Jenkins’s prose poems lack in depth and variety, Rylance and the production provide instead."

am New York 63/100
(Matt Windman) "the poems, despite their humorous and meditative qualities, do not offer the narrative sustenance or characterization to support a 95-minute piece of theater, leaving it fragmented, uneventful and generally unsatisfying."

The Guardian 60/100
(Alexis Soloski) "The whole may not add up to much more than a gently absurdist evocation of mood... Still, there are few greater joys in the contemporary theater than watching Rylance do his wide-eyed, thick-voiced thing. To see him wrestle with a tent is a vision to melt even the iciest heart."

New York Daily News 60/100
(Joe Dziemianowicz) "while there are moments that hook you and amuse and charm, the show, told in short scenes between blackouts in lieu of actual transitions, loses its grip.These ice men cometh — and sometimes boreth" 

NBC New York 55/100
(Robert Kahn) "'Nice Fish' doesn’t have an urban sensibility that will be instantly appealing to New York theatergoers, but on the other hand, it’s nice to get out of town at this time of year, isn’t it?"

The Wrap 30/100
(Robert Hofler)  "The girl falls off the stage, literally, to learn whatever it is Shakespeare wrote half a millennium ago about life and the theater. Otherwise, what’s learned here is not unlike the lessons told late at night by that depressed student down the hallway in your college dorm."