Did Critics Welcome Sandra Oh's Return to the Stage in Satellites?

In Satellites, playwright Diana Son examines the challenges faced by a multiracial couple who settle down with their baby in a crumbling Brooklyn brownstone. The play marks Son's return to the Public Theater eight years after the success of Stop Kiss and a reunion for the playwright and stars Sandra Oh and Kevin Carroll. Did critics embrace this contemporary play's methods and message?

Here's a sampling of what they had to say:

William Stevenson in his Broadway.com review: "At times, Son's New York story gets bogged down in minutiae of real estate, parenting, families, coworkers and other day-to-day realities. But the believable conflicts and empathetic acting make this a compelling follow-up to Son's Stop Kiss, a 1998 hit at the Public Theater. … Nina is the most fleshed-out, sympathetic character, and Oh brings out every ounce of her frustration…. Son gets most of the details right in this engaging domestic drama while also making a number of astute observations about the challenges facing a young, 21st-century New York City couple—even one that seems to have everything going for them."

Ben Brantley in The New York Times: "Satellites, directed with shrewdness and compassion by the much-employed Michael Greif, lacks the compositional balance and elegance of Stop Kiss. In the last quarter of the new play's 90 minutes, you can sense its author groping frantically for an exit from the labyrinth she has built. Yet as a portrayal of a disordered American social order struggling to rearrange itself, Satellites is both deeper and broader than its predecessor….Ms. Oh, who since Stop Kiss has become a popular actress in film Sideways and television Grey's Anatomy, is an ideal central conduit for the play's aching ambivalence: a spiky amalgam of frustration and empathy, bright optimism and gloomy resignation. It's a gutsy, physically charged portrait that never coasts on charm or begs for the audience's affection."

Frank Scheck in New York Post: "Let's hope, for her sake, playwright Diana Son's experience with motherhood has gone better for her than for Nina, one of the central characters of her new play Satellites. Played by Sandra Oh Grey's Anatomy, Nina is an exhausted, frenzied bundle of nerves, desperately attempting to balance the demands of her baby, her husband, her career and the pressures of moving into a new home that is literally crumbling around her. The play itself is suffused with a raw and personal feeling that is almost painful to watch. Each of the characters is floundering… Although the play, Son's first since her highly acclaimed "Stop Kiss," is obviously deeply felt, it seems more cathartic than illuminating. Although individual moments are highly resonant—a scene in which Miles complains bitterly that the couple wasn't ready for parenthood produced gasps in the audience— the accumulation of conflicts feels contrived [and] ultimately becomes as exhausting for the audience as they do for the characters."

David Rooney in Variety: "Ethnic identity anxiety, cultural differences and personal pressure stack up against a mixed-race couple with a new baby in a gentrifying Brooklyn neighborhood in Diana Son's Satellites. The playwright's reunion, after 1998 hit Stop Kiss, with the Public Theater and with star Sandra Oh is intelligent and well-intentioned but somewhat unsatisfying—like spending time with friends who were more fun and interesting before they became parents and the conversation got stuck on child-rearing, sleep deprivation and renovation headaches. Michael Greif's hyperactive direction only exacerbates the play's shortage of emotional involvement…While Son's dialogue is smart and enlivened by wry observations, much of this is articulated from a forced, post-therapy perspective that hangs as awkwardly on the play's naturalistic frame as does the too-tidy resolution. The actors all do credible work, and it's a pleasure to see Oh back on a New York stage, her deft balance of droll cynicism and flinty abrasiveness channeled to convey a woman buckling under accumulated strain. But Greif in too many ways behaves like he's still directing Rent, keeping the cast incessantly motoring around the stage in a state of amped-up agitation. Their anxieties become as enervating for the audience as they are for the characters."

Linda Winer in Newsday: "Except for an abrupt resolution too tidy for its material and the occasional glib quip, this is an engrossing, unpredictable and believable portrait of people we think we know too well. Michael Greif's production never lets the slick implications of its lavish high-tech naturalistic set by Mark Wendland overshadow the detailed honesty of Son's surprising characters. She is happily reunited with Sandra Oh, unknown from Grey's Anatomy and Sideways when she played one of the two straight women discovering one another eight years ago in Stop Kiss. Oh is Nina, the career-driven woman suddenly confused by the power of motherhood. Watch how she curls over the infant with a primal wariness that's almost feral. Kevin Carroll, another alum from Stop Kiss, is equally empathetic as Miles, raised by a white family and confronted, perhaps for the first time, with questions about who he thinks he is. We could live without the jokes about baby flatulence and the reflex to overexplain a bit too much about everyone's background. But Son—a writer/producer of Law & Order: Criminal Intent—has a voice the theater needs. It is familiar and new at the same time."