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You Wouldn't understand
a short film (2021)
directed by Trish Harnetiaux
Written by Trish Harnetiaux + jacob a. ware
Sundance Film Festival, Atlanta Film Festival, Fantasia Film Festival, Screamfest LA, Florida Film Festival, Mórbido Film Fest and more.
2020-21 Selected press:
“...this offbeat little film is an utter delight, featuring pitch-perfect comedic performances...You Wouldn’t Understand is an unassuming little gem that knows exactly what is...You Wouldn’t Understand was, for me, a festival highlight.”
“Harnetiaux delivers an unexpected piece of ironic other-worldly storytelling, starring two endearing actors who leave a grin on your face. Give us more, please.”
“The film specializes in the strange and at no point takes the action on screen too seriously. It’s silly and ridiculous, yet it remains mesmerizing to the very end. The twist comes out of nowhere. The more You Wouldn’t Understand commits to the sudden sci-fi premise, the more the movie shines as an outright absurdist comedy.”
“9 minutes of sci-fi absurdity is what I Iive for during Fantasia International Film Festival. You Wouldn’t Understand no matter how hard you try. Impeccably shot and hilariously acted, the only thing wrong with it is that it ends!...The film is a true collaboration. Director Trish Harnetiaux, also co-wrote the script with actor Jacob A. Ware, while co-star Anthony Arkin edited the short. No surprise the three formed the production company Steel Drum In Space. Which is a hilarious moniker of its own… for obvious scientific reasons.”
“If Monty Python gets your goat, if great writing is your jam, if superb cinematography gets your engine revved, then You Wouldn’t Understand will make complete sense as a viewing experience."
TIN CAT SHOES
Clubbed Thumb Summerworks 2018
directed by knud adams
"(four stars)... Tin Cat Shoes is a delight in three acts...It's like watching a dandelion puff his a frying pan. The play's first section, when the employees are still in the shoe store, is basically perfect... Though the play constantly and deliberately undermines its urgency with silliness, it has a secret coherence from the start -- a running commentary on how we overvalue work." Helen Shaw, Time Out New York
"Ms. Harnetiaux is following her own System, which involves dismantling our pathetic trust in all systems." Ben Brantley, New York Times
"Still, fitting all this into 90 minutes makes for the perfect show, a trick Clubbed Thumb seems to have mastered. Earlier productions, including "Tin Cat Shoes" in May and, in previous seasons, "Men on Boats" and "Of Government," hit all the right notes." Jesse Green, New York Times review of "Wilder Gone"
how to get into buildings
new georges 2015
directed by katie brook
"(four stars)... a treat for fans of the avant-garde version of boulevard entertainment...Harnetiaux does some quite sophisticated structural work here, slipstreaming her events in space and constantly somersaulting timeline." Helen Shaw, Time Out New York
"Trish Harnetiaux's experimental new work is a wild, wildly fun ride." Culture Catch
"Entertaining and hilarious...Trish Harnetiaux has crafted a piece that is laugh out loud funny and at the same time a reminder to embrace every seemingly insignificant moment in your life. Her language is modern, weird, but just right for the world she has created." New York Theatre Review
"The experience of watching the play is as if you had a lens that zoomed in on a minute detail such as the clasp on a chain and then zooms out on a massive car crash." Culturebot
"Put a Walter Mitty-esque imagination through an experimental theatre blender, and you may come close to the spirit and tone of Trish Harnetiaux's new play How To Get Into Buildings." Exeunt Magazine
IF YOU CAN GET TO BUFFALO
SON OF SEMELE // LOS ANGELES //2015
directed by edgar landa
STAGE RAW names Buffalo one of the best 10 shows in LA.
"Inventive and crisply staged...If You Can Get To Buffalo finally deflates the utopian pretenses of cyberspace by reminding us that human technology also carries in it its makers' most craven impulses." Bill Raden, StageRaw
"For all its swift satire and comic invention, Buffalo still manages to reach deep. Far deeper, in fact, than the pontifications or pundits or the ponderings of scholars. Because it's theatre, done strikingly well, and makes us feel the human experience of those events." Theatre Ghost
"With larky humor and lacerating wit, If You Can Get To Buffalo takes us on a brief journey of discovery. We realize, as the characters do, that freedom isn't free, and that virtual reality is neither virtuous nor real. These are important lessons; and you won't find a more delightful - and moving - way to learn them." Theatre Ghost
"100% sweet" Bitter Lemons
"The ultimate online party." Broadway World
"a fine morsel of eclectic humor" Discover Hollywood
WELCOME TO THE WHITE ROOM
GLASS MIND THEATRE // BALTIMORE //2014
directed by CHRIS COTTERMAN
2014 Winner of The Bad Oracle's New Blood Award for Best Play
"Illusions are enigmatic, but what happens when the lines are completely blurred and life takes on the kind of dream-like twist that only eating an entire meat-loves pizza just before bed can induce? Pure whimsy - which may be the best way to describe Trish Harnetiaux's new play, Welcome to the White Room."
Baltimore Post-Examiner
"Welcome to the White Room by playwright, Trish Harnetiaux, is a world-premiere and how fortunate we should consider ourselves to have such a provocative, new show in Baltimore." DC Theatre Metro Arts
"...playwright Trish Harnetiaux and director Chris Cotterman keep things moving at such a steady pace, with a stream of clever lines and physical comedy, that the audience never really feels lost. We're in this together, it seems, and there's more than enough to chew on before some secrets are revealed in the final moments". City Paper
"...Trish Harnetiaux's brave and clever script... Fans of the surreal, do please make an evening or afternoon of it and treat yourselves to WELCOME TO THE WHITE ROOM." Broadway World
"Harnetiaux plays some really neato tricks on your too-big human brain that, trust me, you'll dig. Toss in razor sharp acting, engaged direction, a gaspy third act twist...really what could be better?" The Bad Oracle
"At times the show almost feels like a send up of some of the most pretentious, self-important theater of this type I've ever seen. And I loved it. The sense of humor that infuses the whole proceeding makes it buoyant, not draggy, effervescent, not ponderous, like it took a shot of Fizzy Lifting Drink." The Bad Oracle
IF YOU CAN GET TO BUFFALO
INCUBATOR ARTS PROJECT// NYC //2014
acme corporation // baltimore // 2013
directed by ERIC NIGHTENGALE
"The early '90s was the dinosaur age of the Internet: Dial-up modems whined, the 'information superhighway' was a common parlance, and multi-user dimensions - the fledging ancestors of virtual worlds were just emerging. Trish Harnetiaux isn't nostalgic for that time in her new play, If You Can Get To Buffalo, but she makes an amusingly pertinent case for revisiting it and, more specifically, LambdaMOO, a nascent chatroom that witnessed one of the world's first virtual crimes and began the debate on internet rights." The Village Voice
"And though the rape may read in an absurd fashion on the chat screen alone, with its voodoo doll domination and ultra-violent kitchen object penetration, the audience sees true traumatic horror in the faces of those sitting behind the keyboards. You feel chills when one of the wide-eyed participants flips the table in a passion furor. You clamp your hand over your mouth as she sits with her back against the table in traumatic silence, taking stock of how quickly this playful paradise became a hell." KillScreenDaily.com
"If You Can Get To Buffalo, a clever splashy and quirky multimedia play...The play explores the friendships that formed in this virtual world, and asks whether they were real or fake. It explores events that occurred in this house, promises made and broken, personal freedoms given and taken away, and personal spaces invaded. It asks: if you give your trust to someone too soon on the internet, and they violate that trust, just who is to blame? In truth, though, the real question here might be why we ever assumed internet relationships should be treated any differently that real world ones." Stage Buddy
"...the thread that connects the two worlds is ordinary humans just doing their damndest to be happy; ultimately, the smug news anchor secretly turns to the Internet with reluctant but palpable excitement at the end of the play, typing away in a chatroom in the hopes of making an exciting new connection. "If you can get to Buffalo..." she says as she types, hoping to connect offline with her newfound Internet compatriots, no longer deriding this cyber-world. IN some ways, the play proves that we don't need VR headsets or increasingly haptic controllers: virtual places can already be startling real." KillScreenDaily.com
"It is strange to think back on the internet as a text-based phenomenon, and Harnetiaux brilliantly captures the ambivalence of that moment right between the pre-internet world and our world, where we are inundated with it, drowning in it, allowing this now-ancient-seeming past to articulate the questions that are even more pressing today." City Paper
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