Tom Sellar of Village Voice applauds The Tenant (Full Review):

City dwellers know how many personal dramas can overlap when people are thrown together. The social friction can be a pleasure—or it can make you crazy. The Tenant, a new site-specific performance piece by the adventurous Woodshed Collective, unfurls this reality like a great theatrical tapestry of vintage grit. The action sprawls across five floors of a derelict church and parish house. Spectators wander through at their own pace, exploring spaces as minute as a closet and as broad as a darkened sanctuary. At each stop (and sometimes in between), we encounter fresh data—spotting a new character, overhearing a bit of revealing dialogue—and can only speculate on which parts of this enigma might fit together.

Ultimately, The Tenant is a triumph of simultaneity and atmosphere over narrative satisfaction. It’s a memorable evening, thanks in large part to the extraordinary production design by Gabriel Hainer Evansohn.

Benjamin Sutton at The L Magazine applauds the immersive environment of The Tenant (Full Review):

The acting is by and large very strong, especially in long, intimate scenes like a drunken game of “canard, canard, goose” in Trelkovsky’s apartment, the Zys’ fight over a mummified talisman, or the off-air banter between two radio play performers. There are wordless moments of great visual power too, as when roughly half the cast begins pacing the halls dressed like the deceased former tenant in blonde wig and red dress, or when the silhouetted man across the square stares insistently into Trelkovsky’s room. Whatever fragments of the various stories one comes away with, The Tenant‘s success can be gauged by the extent of its immersion. After two hours one feels less like a spectator and more like an inhabitant of a beautifully dilapidated old building whose tenants are all different degrees of crazy.

Adam Feldman at Time Out New York praises The Tenant (Full Review):

The Tenant has much to recommend: Especially for a show presented free of charge, it is impressively ambitious, inventive and creative.

John Del Signore at Gothamist applauds The Tenant (Full Review):

The show’s dreamlike mood of sinister paranoia is so palpable and persuasive that it almost doesn’t matter if the story loses you. The world they’ve created is a fascinating one to get lost in.

Carl Faber’s marvelous lighting design creates an atmosphere of creepy anxiety, and it soon becomes clear that this is less an apartment building and more an insane asylum.

Michael Dale of BroadwayWorld.com raves (Full Review):

It’s inevitable that Woodshed Collective’s The Tenant, a site-specific theatrical interpretation of Roland Topor’s novella via Roman Polanski’s film adaptation, will be compared with the downtown hit, Sleep No More. Both require audience members to freely walk through several floors of rooms, exploring the contents and running into actors playing out scenes. But despite its less elaborate production values, I found The Tenant to be a far superior and much more entertaining experience.

The Tenant is a tightly woven ninety minute psychological thriller, played in the compact environs of West-Park Presbyterian Church, where 23 actors are continually tempting spectators to travel from one intriguing scenario to another.

Co-directed by Teddy Bergman and Stephen Brackett, the terse dialogue of the moody evening is played with delicious aloofness, even when audience members are standing inches away from the actors. Music by Duncan Sheik and David van Tieghem, as well as sound design by Brandon Wolcott, subtly adds to the tension and designer Gabriel Hainer Evansohn provides the wonderfully dingy settings for the dilapidated residence.

David Barbour at Lighting and Sound America raves over the “impressive” design of The Tenant (Full Review):

In terms of mood, The Tenant can’t be beat; the company has conspired to build a multilevel petit bourgeois hell in which men prey on women, marriages fray from sheer irritation, and, in even the simplest transaction, naked hostility is never far from the surface.

Every last sordid emotion is realized with unnerving effectiveness by a uniformly skilled cast – all the more so, given the way they have to negotiate the constantly shifting crowds around them.

The Tenant is free, and, on its own terms, it’s a remarkable achievement. It’s also a golden opportunity to get a look at the work of some young people who will definitely be heard from again. If this sort of theatre is your thing, then The Tenant will be catnip. If it isn’t, or you’re simply curious, it may still be worth a look, because this is about as good as this genre gets.

If anyone gave an award for production management, The Tenant would be a leading contender, for the efficient husbanding of all these elements — and the actors as they move from scene to scene — is very, very impressive.

The Tenant is never dull and, thanks to the cast and crew, I’ll take it over Sleep No More any day.

Sandi Durell of NY Theater Examiner raves over The Tenant (Full Review):

The various tenement residents are vibrant in the portrayal of eight stories of love, lust, passion, hate, terror, fear and delusions all centering on Trelkovsky’s downward spiral when accusatory neighbors invade, creating the ultimate crisis and questioning who we are as humans.

The Collective has staged and installed the scenic settings over five floors in the old Church for its 23 member cast. The sets, costumes, lights, video design are all fabulously conceived.

Andy Propst of TheaterMania applauds the achievements of The Tenant (Full Review):

The show proves to be not only a remarkable logistical achievement (a 23-person company performs the piece through various spaces on five floors of the building), but also an impressive artistic one, featuring some top-notch play-writing and some fine performances.

What impresses most about the production is how astutely and ably the company builds the intensity and suspense within the context of a narrative that is truly controlled by theatergoers’ individual choices. Even if one has not been following Trelkovsky specifically, it’s impossible to not sense his weakening mental condition and even feel some of the fear he feels: a sense that’s only heightened by some exceptionally creepy original music by Duncan Sheik and David van Tieghem and an equally eerie soundscape from Brandon Wolcott.

David Sheward at Backstage applauds the design of The Tenant (Full Review):

The most fascinating aspect of the production is Gabriel Hainer Evansohn’s detailed production design, which creates an entire world of shabby attempted elegance and buried mysteries. As an art installation, “The Tenant” succeeds.

Rachel Merrill Moss of NYtheatre.com can’t get enough of The Tenant (Full Review):

Woodshed Collective has amazingly transformed the innards of the vast West-Park Presbyterian Church into a sprawling Parisian apartment complex, complete with a bar, courtyard, wig shop and scores of sumptuously designed apartments, each weirder and more telling of its inhabitant’s flaws than the previous. The freedom to explore the vast and lush indoor landscape is exciting and fun, but also somewhat challenging, being drawn to both action and aesthetic and often being forced to choose. Truly, the only really lamentable aspect of this darkly beautiful production is the physical inability to be in all parts of the building at once, peeping in on all the little domestic foibles and toilings that unfold throughout simultaneously. While The Tenant is not meant for those desirous of an “easy-going” theatre experience, it certainly offers just rewards to the adventurous.

Part of the joy of this production, too, is the ease with which it is possible to observe others observing the various performances, as well as other’s reactions and comfort levels in the increasingly tense rooms and corridors. This allowance (and perhaps intent) to acknowledge a shared experience is so seldom part of theatrical practice and adds another layer of richness to this spectacular layer cake.

The large cast, who seem to continue to keep emerging from doorways and dark rooms, all operate independently, performing, often, to empty rooms or moving bodies. Directors Stephen Brackett and Teddy Bergman have ably and commendably allowed the cast a way to truly seem right at home, and it is the ease with which this talented bunch of actors perform their roles in non-traditional circumstances that makes them so enjoyable to watch.