Reviews

That Which Isn't

"[A] graceful psychodrama...scalpel-sharp...A day later, I can still feel its melancholy chill." - Helen Shaw, The Village Voice

"Freeman’s script is like a literary iceberg, with much of its context floating dark under the surface...That Which Isn’t is a heartbreaking work." - Marti Sichel, Woman Around Town

"Freeman has an ear for tense naturalism." - Jenna Scherer, Time Out

The Listeners

"Matthew Freeman’s The Listeners boasts a swinging, Aleister Crowley naughtiness. It’s a Lynchian fable set in a bed-and-breakfast where time has a habit of looping back on itself. Imagine The Wicker Man sprinkled with Pinter: dark and silly, silly and dark." - Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

"Think Ionesco writing for The Twilight Zone" - Teddy Nicholas, New York Theater Review

Why We Left Brooklyn

"CRITIC'S PICK! See Why We Left Brooklyn. Frowsy, Funny, Quietly Furious. Matthew Freeman’s play—a dinner party from hell packed with aging, underemployed actors and artists clinging to the fringes of their ever-gentrifying borough—doesn’t stop short of caricature: It barrels right through, spilling up-sold wine and cheap irony all over the Ikea furniture." - Scott Brown, New York Magazine

"A love letter to a borough like no other from a generation like no other." - Jim Taylor, WCBS Radio 

"Why We Left Brooklyn is a tragedy of manners in the realist tradition of Chekhov and Ibsen....Kyle Ancowitz’s deft realization of Matthew Freeman’s airtight script will make everyone over the age of thirty who holds a liberal arts degree squirm uncomfortably. But it’s a good kind of discomfort, a salutary kind. Why We Left Brooklyn reminds those of us who haven’t achieved super-stardom that our struggles and our problems are no less valid because someone else has had it worse, or has been a bigger success, or has moved out of the borough." - Will Kenton, Cultural Capitol

"Why We Left Brooklyn is Gawker snark served with screwball spin...There’s real, galvanizing anger among the zingers, particularly in Freeman’s outrage at the humiliations of the actor’s life." - Helen Shaw, Time Out New York

"The dialogue — satiric wit, intelligence, humor and insight — that emanates from the mouths of Mathew Freeman’s characters is fresh, and makes Why We Left Brooklyn a particular pleasure" - Eleanor Foa Dienstag, Woman Around Town

"A play that is both highly contemporary and rooted in the classic American tradition ...with its exceptionally literate dialogue, its seriocomic treatment of an essentially sad situation, and, yes, that three-act setup, it feels like the 21st-century version of a comedy by Philip Barry or S. N. Behrman. Like them, Freeman finds meaning in contemporary manners and mores..." - David Barbour, Lighting & Sound America

 "A sweet and funny New York story." - Molly Marinik, Theater Is Easy

The Most Wonderful Love

"Talk about taking a cleaver to the Cleavers. The mid-American family at the heart of Matthew Freeman's fearless new satire, "The Most Wonderful Love," is decidedly fractured when the play begins. By the time it's over, a complete dismemberment has been performed...as savage as any slasher film." 

-Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times

"The Most Wonderful Love is awesomely anarchic, gleefully taking potshots and/or turning on their ear all manner of sacred cows. That it does so without ever sacrificing its fundamental intelligence and integrity, and without ever really getting angry or shrill, makes it a particularly impressive achievement." 

-Martin Denton, www.nytheatre.com

When is a Clock

"...there’s a monologue that deserves to be enshrined in some kind of hall of fame: it’s savvy and preposterous and utterly original...appealingly abnormal..."

-Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times

"Tantalizing and fascinating." 

-Martin Denton, www.nytheatre.com

This Is Normal

Ten Minutes of Silence by Paul Ford

"Freeman is a tireless innovator... the event is beautiful."

- Ed Malin, Theatre in the Now

Brandywine Distillery Fire

"...nails a certain brand of theater in-joke, the kind of thing that Christopher Guest would come up with if he set his sights on downtown theater."

-Jason Zinoman, New York Times

Glee Club

"How lucky we are to have frankly immoral plays about morbidly unhappy people like Blue Coyote Theater’s current production, Glee Club!"

- Jonathan Leaf, Edge New York

"The kind of sketch comedy-inspired play you can't help but laugh along with."

-Amanda Cooper, Curtainup.com

The Death of King Arthur

"The playwright is a 25-year-old named Matthew Freeman who has brashly tried to tell the back half of the Camelot tale as Shakespeare might have. Amazingly, he has largely succeeded, rendering the familiar story of honor and betrayal in an iambic pentameter that, at its best, is both lyrical and clear."

-Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times

Reasons for Moving

"Reasons for Moving is a dark, brooding, intimate, very personal drama about contemporary middle-aged American men in crisis. It's compelling, intense, discomfiting, even a little scary. And it marks Freeman as a writer of enormous promise, range, and maturity."

-Martin Denton, www.nytheatre.com

The Great Escape

"Freeman's writing is remarkably strong here—vivid and exact and astonishingly far reaching."

-Martin Dention, www.nytheatre.com

The Americans

"...a sad, stirring, introspective piece..."  

-Martin Denton, www.nytheatre.com

An Interview with the Author

""It's smart and hilarious, which won't surprise Freeman's fans; it's also, apart from its obvious parody of the central notions of pretentious theatre in general and this festival in particular, a devastating satire of the current culture of introspection and self-flagellation."

-Martin Denton, www.nytheatre.com

Articles

About “This Is Normal” by Matthew Freeman

Ten Minutes of Silence by Paul Ford

“I’ve Seen ‘Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’ 15 Times” published in Humungus.

Interviews

Go See A Show Podcast!

Why We Left Brooklyn: Interview with Matthew Freeman and Kyle Ancowitz, September 12th, 2013

The Listeners: Interview with Matthew Freeman, February 12th, 2015

Adam Szymkowciz "I Interview Playwrights"

Interview 3: Matthew Freeman,  June 5th, 2009

The Mantle

Gary Winter interviews Matthew Freeman and Kyle Ancowitz re: Why We Left Brooklyn, August 27th, 2010

CFR - 5 Questions You've Never Been Asked

Leonard Jacobs interview with Matthew Freeman, March 9th 2010

Visible Soul - People You Should Know

Zack Calhoun interview Matthew Freeman, August 11th, 2009