“Thomas Riccio is saying something more, something bigger... he is mixing several different realities or frames of reality that transform characters through impersonation. Through impersonation, their lives take on meaning, enabling them to exist within many realities until reality itself loses definition. Advertisements, game shows, film clips all become part of their reality until everyday life becomes a unity of impersonation.”

“Dialogue in DP92 is, as it is in every Zombies show, more of an artful construction than it is a delivery device for information. Language is explored for its rhythms and its mysteries. Characters speak a mix of poetry, academic construction, and private epiphany. Somehow ideas come across and necessary plot points are expressed. But most of all the language, no matter how many currents of philosophy a character might be chasing, is presented as a chant to invite a robust meditation.”

“But much is startling, nothing is quite predicable, in Thomas Riccio’s collage of American Images. It manipulates American mythic figures—Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, and John F. Kennedy—and a garbage mountain of other cutout images from the American scene to paint a hallucinatory but precise picture of corruption. It starts with worship of rock and roll idols, ends with the worship of Christ-as-a-TV-preacher, and along the way it builds momentum as a hammering moral indictment of the American way.

What Riccio brings to his circus, along with the pounding energy of the presentation, gives the production a manic power and sweep. It’s like watching Niagara flow upside down. Streaks and blips of phoniness perversion, and illusion wheel, circle, and blend together to create a Dantesque vision of a gone world.”