image from getting known
Image from "Getting Known"
REVIEWS/CRITICS

THE PROVIDENCE PHEONIX/Rodriguez
There are signature characteristics to Hunter's story: hypochondria, fantastical tangents, self-mockery, and hilarious images.
(VIEW PDF OF ARTICLE HERE).

THE PROVIDENCE PHEONIX/Rodriguez
Paula Hunter gets under your skin. It's not just the wild hairdos and costumes, nor the intimate venue of her living room (73 Summit Avenue, Providence). It's that her unusual blend of storytelling and movement is so trenchant and so funny that you can't get certain images or phrases out of your head.
(FULL ARTICLE HERE).

THE PROVIDENCE PHOENIX/Rodriguez
Hunter is a master of psychological description, conveying her guilt as an artist/mother, her hyperactive sense of worry, her eccentric family of origin, and her quirky superstitions...

NEW YORK TIMES/Dunning
Neither laughter nor pain is ever quite undiluted for the character Paula Hunter plays in her solos...

VILLAGE VOICE/Supree
You probably wouldn't let Paula Hunter babysit for your kid if you saw her solos.

VILLAGE VOICE/Stone
GETTING KNOWN is a brilliant, hard-as-nails memory trek about a gritty childhood that spins waste, murk, and disability into triumphant wholeness.  Hunter's dad is both good genie and gremlin, dripping away his life with lies he pretends are dreams, days at the track, booking bets, accumulating disappointment until he feels weightless.  His daughter bears down on her own lies until they become clear, deshamed windows.

PROVIDENCE JOURNAL
Paula Hunter was brilliant; others had their moments.

THE NEW YORKER/Conley
Hunter--who will follow this engagement with a performance next week at DTW of her memoir play -Mounting Evidence;-- warms up with her Decidedly for Daddy, a blend of dance with reminiscences about her eccentric father, a newspaper reporter in small town Michigan.  He would make the children stand on their heads after dinner in the belief that the practice, in directing nourishment to their eyeballs, would help alleviate the family myopia.  Through most of her monologue, Hunter carries around a silent man--inescapably, a father figure--in a way that underlines her struggle with these burdens. The piece she says, is about this American notion of inventing yourself--which you can't really do.

THE AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN/Klym,
A whirlwind of talent...

NEW YORK TIMES/Anderson
But you don't have to go to Lincoln Center to be surprised, PAULA HUNTER is dancing a comic solo titled, "I am Karen Finley," in a Midtown window.  During the course of the action, she'll be covering herself with food products, as the performance artist Ms. Finley often did.  Her sponge bath in chocolate syrup may well cause pedestrians to gape...

MANHATTAN SPIRIT/Naude
Hunter's writing is brilliant.

NEW YORK TIMES/Dunning
VISITED ON ME--Ms. Hunter depicts a dysfunctional family that a latter-day Thurber might have concocted...  Ms. Hunter pieces drab-sounding details of everyday lives into a quilt of bizarre behavior.  The family grows nuttier by the moment, with the father an unforgettably crazed curmudgeon, taking center place.  Ms. Hunter's description of a family trip to the supermarket is hilarious and horrifying.

NEW YORK TIMES/Dunning
MOUNTING EVIDENCE--Hunter, draws her material from her life as one of five hapless children of a well-meaning but passive mother and a comically lunatic father.  But there is not an ounce of self-pity in her blunt yet delicately wrought monologues...  Ms. Hunter hurtles along a fast-forward journey through a childhood spent slipping from one catastrophe to another, all the while cheerfully attempting to appease the gods of disaster.  As Ms. Hunter grows to an equally sad but hilarious adulthood, she paradoxically becomes less obviously addled and more childlike.

DANCE MAGAZINE/Lewis
The movements are culled from sports, street dancing, numerous other styles of dance, and the deepest recesses of Hunter's imagination.  One in One, Walk the Dog, and Petrochemical Mom all make you feel as if you've crossed into a time zone where human motion follows laws you've never learned and may never understand.

THE NEW YORK TIMES/Dunning
PAULA HUNTER In her "Unexpected," the dependably zany Ms. Hunter is "smack dab in the middle of real chaos," as she puts it, "or is she only stuck in the chaotic anxiety of her own mind?"

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