Review: The Colby Sisters of Pittsburgh, Tricycle

 “Nobody knows us. They think they do. But they don’t”

As per the publicity image, Canadian playwright’s Adam Bock’s black comedy The Colby Sisters of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has aspirations of splashy cultural recognition with other North American fantastical worlds such as Carrie Bradshaw’s fabulously-affordable-somehow-even-though-shes-a-writer fashion-dominated New York, or the glossy lives of the spoiled uber-rich teens of Gossip Girl, but it achieves neither with a curiously unsatisfying clunk, possibly the first mis-step by Indhu Rubasingham since taking over the Tricycle.

It’s all so insubstantial, not in the way that the lives of the five spoiled sisters from Pitts…etc who now reside in New York are super-vacuous (though they are), but in the fact that Bock says nothing of any import about them. In their world, money says everything, except that it doesn’t really say a lot and being told money doesn’t buy you happiness is hardly ground-breaking stuff. Hints of more interesting stories do poke their way through in Trip Cullman’s production but at just over an hour, there’s no room for them to develop.

Running time: 75 minutes
Booking until 26th July

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