New York Times Review of "Wilderness", the play....

Therapy Becomes Theatre in "Wilderness"

DIXIE NATIONAL FOREST, UTAH — Standing off to the side of a dusty, unpaved road through the high desert, taking a break from a late-summer hike, the  producer Anne Hamburger listened as a small gaggle of teenagers walked her through a favorite joke. With camp gear dangling from their enormous packs, the teenagers weren’t out there for recreation. They were clients in a wilderness therapy program like the one Ms. Hamburger sent her adolescent son to in 2014 — an episode that inspired her new documentary theater piece, “Wilderness,” in previews starting Friday, Oct. 21, at Abrons Arts Center. She was spending a couple of days with them for research, and the teenagers — four boys and a transgender girl, part of Evoke Therapy Programs’ Group 6 — were lobbying her to put their grim, poignant little riddle in the show. They like to pose it to new arrivals when an airplane passes overhead.

“How far away do you think that plane is?” they’ll ask, gazing skyward. The newbies inevitably interpret the question in terms of distance, but the whole point of the joke is time — how long it will be until they get out of this program and fly away home, back to the parents who sent them here for intensive help with intractable problems like drug use or depression, defiance or self-harm. The wry punch line is a ballpark figure: “12 to 15 weeks.”  READ THE REVIEW HERE