SOURCE: Isherwood, Charles. “An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein.” Variety 384, no. 11 (29 October 2001): 35.

In the following review of the theatrical production “An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein,” Isherwood criticizes the series of one-act plays as tiresome, dated, tasteless, feeble, and lacking in humor.

According to the program of the Atlantic Theater Co.'s “An Adult Evening of Shel Silverstein,” the late Silverstein, who died in 1999, wrote “hundreds” of short plays. Assuming the 10 collected in this omnibus are among the strongest, it's safe to say that Silverstein's dramatic output is not going to have the enduring appeal of his famous children's books such as The Giving Tree and Where the Sidewalk Ends.

The sketches in this tiresome evening are fitfully amusing, but they are more frequently dated, tasteless or just plain feeble, and they are not given much of a lift by the performers in Karen Kohlhaas' production. Aside from...