“The set (designed by Jason Sherwood) is crafted sometimes like a life-size dollhouse and seamlessly morphs into a colossal pinball machine. It also brilliantly incorporates projection work (by Alex Basco Koch) around a single doorway. There’s also live camera work. The lighting design (by David Weiner) is stunning. Take special notice of Ken Travis’s three-dimensional sound design. The overall design work in this show is a clear glimpse into the future of theatrics.”

“The video design, by Alex Koch, plays the major supporting role. The most striking moment integrates imagery and action: Ms. Cheek hunches before an image of Theresa’s bed, poetically suggesting a woman shrunk to the size of a stuffed animal on her pillow, as her sister tries to cheer her up.

Other video sequences — montages of dance floors and bar crawls, and the culminating re-creation of Theresa’s murder — subvert the period ambience of the music to suggest that today’s casual hookup scene shares the same dangerous undertow that the bar scene of the 1970s did.”

“In the helmers’ most stylized move, Lear’s life is presented as a theater dressed with overlapping television screens; his 9-year-old self (played by Keaton Nigel Cooke) wanders this live collage of past, future and present, while the real-life Lear — still tack-sharp at 93 — looks on. Iridescently shot by Noah Baumbach’s current d.p. Sam Levy, with a lovely, skittering free-jazz score by Kris Bowers, these sequences seem more than coincidentally reminiscent of Alejandro G. Inarritu’s anatomy-of-an-actor “Birdman.” ”

“You are constantly encouraged to look into the shadows at the side of Troy Hourie’s endlessly fascinating setting and discover who is watching whom. Along with tantalizing light and projections from John Culbert and Alex Koch that play out America’s racial ferment — luminous intensity alternates with confounding shadows —”

“The most distinctive aspect of the production design is Alex Koch’s projections, a parade of archival images that effortlessly evoke the upheaval and terror of those years – ”