In his review A Card Game Played With High Stakes, Eric Grode discusses the play”A Felony in Blue, or Death by Poker,” which is being performed at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in the East Village. From the very beginning of his review the reader can tell that Grode was un happy with the performance. He has a very negative tone and dedicates the first 2 paragraphs to describing the venue and the atmosphere. He tells the reader that the usher is the playwright- director- actor Rome Neal, who is currently playing Tlonious Monk in a one-man show a few blocks away at the Moldy Fig. He also mentions that you can find the owner of the cafe and lois Elaine Griffith, a poet, sitting at the bar. From the fact that he first mentions the play in the third paragraph I knew that he did not enjoy it.

When he finally comes to talk about the play the first thing he mentions is that it has a title “that takes about as long to say as the play does to perform.” The reader can clearly see that he was dissatisfied by the play from the adjectives he uses to describe it. Grode then goes on to give us a brief summary of the play which is about 5 mob bosses who come together in a game of poker to separate their territories. He mentions some events in the play such as a threatening of someone and his eventual murder. He ends off by saying that the play took 45 minutes and that you can go by books and learn about the clubs history at the bar afterwards. These words showed me that he couldn’t care less about the play and that the atmosphere was more intriguing than the performance it self.

If I had any thought in my mind of seeing this play, Grode just erased that thought. He made it clear that this play was a waste of his time and that it didn’t interest him whatsoever. One thing that bothers me about his review is that he fails to provide reasons as to why the play didn’t interest him. He just mentioned that it was very short and that it did not interest him. I believe that he could’ve captivated his audience in a better manner by listing certain things about the play that threw him off