Review by writer John A. Snyder...
"Yes, Your Tide is Cold and Dark, Sir:" A review.
"Tide" is a psychologically-sophisticated drama touching on a basic human dilemma: the experience of relational estrangement and the desire for emotional closeness. The composer Gustav Mahler once said "All great music or art must express a deep longing." Malinowski captures this longing in spades. From the opening scenes to the dramatic close, Malinowski pulls us into the existential longing for intimacy, along with the myriad ways we can mess it up; from the highly ambivalent longing of a son to reconnect with an emotionally-distant father, a man who can establish unusually close emotional connection with his students; to examples of true emotional connection destroyed by a unilateral push toward sexual expression, to a rather common attempt to overcome painful estrangement in sexual expression without intimacy. Finally, in a dramatic conclusion, Malinowski, with great sensitivity, displays how an unusual capacity for emotional intimacy between two lovers can be destroyed by anxiety and vulnerability turned into suspicious questioning and attempts to control. If you are looking to be taken by the hand through some tedious plot, you will be disappointed. But only the most defended intellectual can leave this drama without being bombarded by, and pulled into, the complicated feelings of existential estrangement and deep longing for human intimacy. "Tide" will grab you where you live, hold you, and not let you go.
-------------------John A. Snyder
"Yes, Your Tide is Cold and Dark, Sir:" A review.
"Tide" is a psychologically-sophisticated drama touching on a basic human dilemma: the experience of relational estrangement and the desire for emotional closeness. The composer Gustav Mahler once said "All great music or art must express a deep longing." Malinowski captures this longing in spades. From the opening scenes to the dramatic close, Malinowski pulls us into the existential longing for intimacy, along with the myriad ways we can mess it up; from the highly ambivalent longing of a son to reconnect with an emotionally-distant father, a man who can establish unusually close emotional connection with his students; to examples of true emotional connection destroyed by a unilateral push toward sexual expression, to a rather common attempt to overcome painful estrangement in sexual expression without intimacy. Finally, in a dramatic conclusion, Malinowski, with great sensitivity, displays how an unusual capacity for emotional intimacy between two lovers can be destroyed by anxiety and vulnerability turned into suspicious questioning and attempts to control. If you are looking to be taken by the hand through some tedious plot, you will be disappointed. But only the most defended intellectual can leave this drama without being bombarded by, and pulled into, the complicated feelings of existential estrangement and deep longing for human intimacy. "Tide" will grab you where you live, hold you, and not let you go.
-------------------John A. Snyder