Broadway World - Highly Recommended
"...the combination of tears and chills I felt stayed with me for hours, so profound was the effect of being in the presence of such a great ensemble of actors who transported the audience into another world to confront a reality all too familiar in these violent times. Inoa's provocative play will no doubt cause discomfort, but her hope to enable "audiences to make a step forward" into our common humanity, makes SCRAPS a show not to miss."
Stage and Cinema - Recommended
"...Now on at The Matrix Theatre, Geraldine Inoa's bold new work Scraps takes elements of both realist play and agitprop but she unfortunately gets in her own way by flipping from searing drama to mystifying agenda-ridden claptrap, making me wonder just who this play is ultimately for."
LA Splash - Recommended
"...Directed by Stevie Walker-Webb, SCRAPS is presented with compassion and empathy, a fascinating peek at a world of trauma and loss. The division between Act I and Act 2 is not so much a division of time - but rather a division of style. Act I's reality morphs into Act 2's stylized Brechian dream state. The real life of stressed adults is contrasted to the disorganized, confusing, and frightening life of a child. This is an intriguing approach which may both attract and reduce audience involvement as they struggle to understand the proceedings."
Total Theater - Somewhat Recommended
"...If this review makes Scraps sound like a complete mess, I have done the play a disservice. The playwright paints a powerful and true portrait of what it's like for black people to live in a world of terror and fear-it's just unfortunate that she obscures the portrait by throwing too much paint at it."
KCRW - Highly Recommended
"...What holds the play together is the remarkable ensemble of actors who go from giving subtle, nuanced performances in act one to over the top physically bold caricatures in act two. It's like two different plays and it's not an easy journey."
Stage Raw - Highly Recommended
"...Geraldine Inoa's incisive character-rich drama, directed by Stevie Walker-Webb at the Matrix Theatre, examines the impact of institutional racism on a group of young people in the aftermath of their friend's murder by police. The off-beat title is a reference to the origin of African-American soul food, prepared by slaves from the scraps their "owners" left for them after they took all the good parts for themselves. This bit of information is relayed by one 19-year-old character to her 20-year-old neighbor as they perch on the stoop of their dilapidated apartment building in Bedford Stuyvesant on a hot summer day."
Theatre Notes - Highly Recommended
"...Bold, timely, hot-blooded, and bewildering, Geraldine Inoa's new play, Scraps, is all these things and more. What an audience sees upon entering the intimate, semi-circular auditorium of the Matrix Theatre is John Iacovelli's terrific rendering of a section of street in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn with a three–step-up apartment house adjacent to a store with a corrugated, roll-up metal door emblazoned with a street-art rendering of a huge black face under a cartoon crown. I couldn't help but think of the 1929 hit play Street Scene."
The TVolution - Not Recommended
"...Now why Ms. Savard, the Matrix Theatre Company or producer Joseph Stern thinks this is a good thing is anybody's guess, but half way through Scraps, the play has an epic warp spasm to rival that of Cúchulainn's backwards bending kneecaps, that takes us from a pretty decent Greek rendering of America's national "goat-song" into a third rate mulligan stew of Naked Hamlet, The Blacks by Jean Genet, and SpongeBob SquarePants on acid."
On Stage and Screen - Highly Recommended
"...All of the performances are stunning, and the way the ensemble works together to create the artistic vision that is act two is impressive. Yolen is fantastic as the grieving girlfriend determined to put on a brave face and not live in fear just because of what happened."
Peoples World - Recommended
"...Stevie Walker-Webb does deeply committed work directing this increasingly hallucinatory confection. If, as the playwright suggests, the play is meant to disturb and disrupt the way theatergoers see the world, the director makes sure that point is driven home. He has effectively staged a couple of stunning scenes, one a hanging which could be described as a self-administered lynching, the other a transformation of the graffitied street scene into a game-show phantasmagoria taking place inside young Sebastian's TV-addled and tragedy-impacted mind. To that end the director is ably aided by scenic designer John Iacovelli, lighting design by Brian Gale and Zo Haynes, and sound design by Jeff Gardner. Wendell C. Carmichael is responsible for the costume design."