Claudia La Rocco, NY Times - October 15, 2009

It's always a pleasure to leave a work wanting to see it again, simply to make sure you have a grasp on all its movable, slippery parts. In a world of sound bites and status updates it's good - even necessary - to remember not everything is easily digested.

Luckily "Liz One (Her Secret Diaries in the Land of 1,000 Dances)" runs through the end of the month, allowing time for return visits to the Chocolate Factory, where the show opened on Wednesday evening. (Queens residents, take note: You get in free on Thursdays.)

Written, directed and designed by John Jesurun, this hourlong, two-person production delves into the fast unraveling mind of an elderly Elizabeth I of England, called Liz One, who is portrayed with fiery fragility by Mr. Jesurun's longtime collaborator Black-Eyed Susan, whose sometimes distractingly unsteady line delivery almost seems like a character choice.

There's nothing unsteady about the queen's foil, Twin Glimmer, who is her secret child, underling, invention and all-around coping device. As played by Benjamin Forster, he is a marvelously conflicted concoction, his jaw by turns clenched and quivering, the banked rages in his disconcerting gaze frequently dying down to weary amusement.

Audiences have much time to contemplate this gaze - and Liz One's frightened, defiant one - while the two trade dense, knotty and often wickedly funny salvos.

He menaces her with a dagger. She is unimpressed, ordering him to "drop the chalupa," and he does.

"Chihuahua-brain! Are you French?" she scoffs. "I am who I am. You are nobody till somebody kills you."

Mr. Jesurun, long a master of creating, and subverting, dizzying mixed-media architecture, has built a hall of convex mirrors and video, both live and recorded, so that the performers often appear to us as technology-mediated, disembodied heads, their exploded realities layered over images of tapestries, constellations, smoke, waves and flame. And viewers themselves are caught in the mirrors and pressed up close against the action, whether as members of the court or shadows of an unstable mind. (Mr. Jesurun's decision to use the theater's length instead of its depth creates a terrifically claustrophobic field of action.)

These tautly choreographed visuals forge a rich theater of images, enhanced by Jeff Nash's jewel-tone lighting and Pamelia Kurstin's quiet, sinuous score. The physical set is wonderfully austere: a white room anchored by Jose Ho's simple, clean-lined white throne. When the razzle-dazzle of projections recedes you see it for what it is: a hollowed-out room of the soul, where all things are possible until all things come to an end.

Paul Menard, Time Out NY - October 21, 2009

John Jesurun has a lineage almost as impressive as that of the Tudors themselves. So one can't help having high expectations for his Liz One, a historical hallucination based on England's Elizabeth I. The award-winning writer-director, along with his longtime collaborator and downtown veteran Black-Eyed Susan, are avant-garde royalty; so why does Liz One feel less than majestic?

It certainly isn't for a lack of substance; Jesurun's dreamlike, two-person historiography gives audiences plenty to chew on. Susan plays the aging monarch, rescripting and censoring her diary in an attempt to change her personal history. But fragments of her past keep getting in the way, usually in the form of Twin Glimmer (Forster), an ever-morphing composite of men who continuously alter Liz's narrative. Hers is a portrait in flux, refracted through projected live-feed video and large fish-eye mirrors that adorn the sparse lateral set.

Intellectually speaking, there's a lot to unpack from Jesurun's text, especially regarding the fallout of Elizabeth I's global imperialism and the sociopolitical baggage attached to aesthetics (fittingly, realism proves particularly problematic). But despite the high-meets-low pastiche dialogue, media-filtered imagery and shifting historical perspectives, the tentative production is missing the spark needed to ignite this cerebral tinder into a theatrical fire. Sadly, it would take more power behind the throne - namely onstage rigor and vigor - to transform Liz One into a crown jewel.

Heather Lee Rogers, nytheatre.com - October 17, 2009

After seeing Liz One (Her Secret Diaries in the Land of 1000 Dances) by John Jesurun, my reaction to the press blurb supplied by the company above this review is:

REALLY????

Suffice it to say that my experience of the play vastly differed from its billing.

I did not find Liz One very engaging or clear, but what follows is my general impression from what little I could glean. In the center of the stage there is a seat for Queen Elizabeth I where she spends most of the play in her stunning dress (designed by Molly Deale). Flanking her on both sides are projections about nine feet high. These projections are often twin, spherical laser-like kaleidoscope images that spin in dizzying unison or they are nine-foot tall close-ups of animated actors' faces. There is a camera on either side of the stage. Sometimes the actors abandon the stage to address cameras, so that we see their wall-sized faces speaking side by side. The play seems to exist in some no-man's-land of indeterminate time and space.

Though you couldn't guess it from the advertising, Liz One is actually a two-person play. Theater veteran Black-Eyed Susan plays "Liz" but shares the stage and lines with Benjamin Forster (a recent NYU grad) the whole time in duet. The text is more often about abstract ideas, largely non-dramatic, and dry. It is generally spoken by both actors as "text that was difficult to memorize" and there is little emotional connection to what they are saying, or who these characters are to each other. Forster's character is called "Twin Glimmer" and he is supposed to represent some child of Elizabeth's that she hid away from the world. Yet the play also seems to treat her conversation and relationship with the Twin Glimmer as non-literal, maybe in her head, maybe all a rumor. The play assumes that it is widely accepted knowledge that Elizabeth was not in fact a "virgin queen" but had multiple illegitimate children and scores of affairs. Often Liz speaks from the center of the stage looking to one side of the stage or another, or at the floor, rarely directly at the Twin Glimmer or the audience. Often she is speaking on stage while the Twin Glimmer is speaking to her through the camera, so that his huge face dwarves her tiny body beside it. The oddity of the text, plus the disconnected way it is delivered, plus the giant moving images distracting your attention make it really difficult to process the meaning of the lines or follow the logic of ideas.

And that's all you get: text and video. There is no plot, physicality, or dramatic action to cling to or help you to care about it. I found the whole thing very stagnant and difficult to engage with. Judging from the shifting in the seats around me, I was not alone in my experience. I missed anything resembling an "intensely reflected history," learned nothing about her alleged love affairs, and couldn't tell you what the "Land of 1000 Dances" refers to. The whole idea of her even writing an account of her life was really only apparent in the last few minutes of the play. All in all I found Liz One in no way resembling the insightful, profoundly layered experience that writer/director/designer John Jesurun apparently intended to present.

Tom Murrin, Paper Magazine, October 14 2009

For almost 30 years, writer/director John Jesurun has been surprising and delighting audiences with his unique eye, ear and mind for a sophisticated, mysterious and repeatedly brilliant kind of theater. All his shows are different, and he has often been years ahead, utilizing the media technology other directors now routinely incorporate into their pieces. This past spring he staged a show called Firefall at Dance Theater Workshop, with a dozen young actors with laptops and a huge backdrop screen that had a constant video feed from the Internet, which the onstage actors were able to interact with, even to the point of purchasing items from eBay while the show was going on. With Liz One (Her Secret Diaries in the Land of 1000 Dances), John focuses on Queen Elizabeth I of England, who is played by Black-Eyed Susan, an original member of Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Company. Ben Forster co-stars. I spoke with John, an old friend.

Hi John. How did a show about Queen Elizabeth come to you? I've wanted to do it for a long time. I've been writing bits and pieces over the years. It's Black-Eyed Susan as Queen Elizabeth the 1st and her secret diaries (an unwritten history that I've made up) which no one has heard before. Ben Forster plays a variety of people, but mostly he is her son that nobody knows about, a son that she's hidden away in the palace.

Yes, the Virgin Queen is not exactly known for having a son. Well, she and he decide to re-write her history. She's writing her diary from the end of her life, and going backwards. It goes all over her life, going over some of the familiar issues that we know about, and some other things as well. For example, that she never had any children and was a virgin to the end of her life. That never happened, according to the play. That's one of the main ideas that explains why Ben is there.

So Ben is her co-biographer of sorts? He is re-writing her life with her, and he sometime argues with her too, like about why he is not going to inherit the throne after her. There is a back and forth relationship between Ben and Susan. Parts of it we wouldn't have known, and some things could have happened. Like she becomes really interested in Buddhism. There's a scene when someone comes back from Japan and tries to teach her how to meditate, and she gets interested in this. It's funny and very serious too.

So this is a Queen Elizabeth we haven't seen before. There's religion and her fight with the pope, and her fight with Spain. They have become Protestants in England by then. There's a lot of interesting things which might have happened because she was very educated. I have her smuggling in books and pamphlets so she can see what is being said about her in other countries at the time. The other countries were Catholic and they wrote horrible things about her. She was called "She-Wolf." It's a very behind the scene, internal look, what you see behind the face of power. You hear conversations most people would never hear, her private image, hiding her son away, having people killed.

How about video? I'm trying to keep it fairly simple, keeping the focus on Susan, and Ben too. The video will be used in a portraiture way, to get close-ups on their faces. Not a huge Internet thing, but a focus on the actors, really; a look at two actors within the story, in an intimate way. And also, it gives Susan a chance to be in the spotlight. She's great in this part.

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