Sleeping Giant

All of Rorschach’s designers (especially costumer Ashlynne Ludwig and props chief Aoife Creighton) meet the script’s challenges with a satisfyingly unholy glee, and director Jenny McConnell Frederick makes clarity the watchword with a tale whose intimations assemble themselves indirectly, with key details dropped in passing exchanges and suggestions playing as important a part as specifics.

Trey Graham, The Washington Post

Indeed, Rorschach director Jenny McConnell Frederick’s entire production is attuned to Yockey’s intricate and elusive tonality. The show traffics in the dualism between perplexing nuance and campy B-movie tropes. Draping the scenery in glistening moss and an ethereal luster, set designer Sarah Beth Hall and lighting designer Dean Leong texture it with the looming threat of the monster just beyond its walls. Sound designer Thom J. Woodward joins in this effort by capturing the foreboding din rolling in from the lake, only to replace it with the far more sinister sounds of celebration in the play’s final scenes. All this is complemented by Aoife Creighton’s detailed attention to the show’s prop design and Ashlynne Ludwig’s astute costume design, on which not an insignificant amount of Yockey’s vignettes depend. Generally, Frederick’s production conjures up a frightful dreamscape that paints its characters’ deteriorating minds in bold strokes and cements Sleeping Giant’s abstract musings in the tangible.

Ian Kirkland, DC Theater Arts