MARK O'Rowe's Terminus has been well received in New York, but the Holy Grail of a rave New York Times review has evaded him. Terminus is thus unlikely to follow in the footsteps of O'Rowe's earlier Howie the Rookie, which became a huge hit after a ecstatic review by the New York Times' Ben Brantley, and was invited back for an extended run offBroadway. (That run never happened due to problems with the actors' union. ) The Times gave Terminus a broadly positive and very prominent review, but effectively damned O'Rowe with faint praise for key aspects of the production.

It was an "entertaining yarn" with "moments of great poignancy", and a "fantastical trip that is certainly never dull", wrote Wilborn Hampton. But he also said writer-director Mark O'Rowe "doesn't seem to have a firm grip on the reins of his runaway story" and concluded that there was "considerably less to 'Terminus' than meets the eye".

Mark Russell, director of the Under the Radar festival that is presenting Terminus, said he was "disappointed that the reviewer didn't 'get' the show as much as he should have" but said there was "a great buzz" about it. The play finishes its two-week run at the Public Theatre this week, and has "basically sold out", he said.

"I'm kicking myself for not making it a four-week run.

"It's a piece that American audiences are almost afraid of. They love it, but it's so intense that they don't think anybody else can take it."

He said the play would "definitely have a life on tour" as a result of the interest shown in it by international festival directors.

"We have gone another mile towards really establishing Mark O'Rowe in the New York theatre world."

Other reviews were far more positive than the New York Times, but have far less clout.

Backstage, an online theatre magazine, wrote that Terminus was "a rare theatrical experience, one where a master storyteller can shock you, impress you, disgust you, and make you appreciate not only that the play is over but also that you survived it (apparently) unscathed".

The three actors, Eileen Walsh, Andrea Irvine and Aidan Kelly, "deliver incredible performances that leave you raw and wounded", wrote Backstage's Jerry Portwood. In another rave review, on theatermania. com, Dan Bacalzo singled out Andrea Irvine for her "absolutely devastating" final monologue.

For nytheatre. com, Ivanna Cullinan said Terminus was "the finest kind of storytelling" and "exerts a pull that is irresistible".

She made two pertinent critical points:

"In certain ways, the piece shouldn't work. The writing delves into a focused exploitation of various rhyme strategies yet it manages not to become subject to them. . . "At times the connections among the characters seem almost too connected, in a way that could be termed as 'neat', except that this story makes its own boundaries and has set them within such super-real parameters that, of course, things fit in a way our mundane reality denies."

As I wrote here when Terminus premiered at the Abbey last summer, both the rhyme and the fantastical narrative were so extraordinary that, like pyrotechnics, they threatened to overwhelm the drama of the piece. But the audacity and skill with which O'Rowe hewed his story out of those materials, and the compelling humanity of both the writing and the performances, rescued the play from being overwhelmed.

On second viewing, in New York, I found the piece both more impressive and more moving. Perhaps because both the rhyme and the story were no longer a surprise, it seemed that the characters and the emotional drama of the play were deeper.

Despite a nervous start on opening night, no doubt due to the pressures of the eight-hour get-in, the play was quickly met with loud laughter and audible revulsion at its more extreme moments.

The actors seemed to respond to the energy of the audience; all three ultimately gave superb performances that seemed both rawer and more immediate than previously.

Edinburgh and perhaps London now await the Terminus team. I would shear another five to 10 minutes off it for its next run . . . not because it is too long per se, but because there are gags in it that could be sacrificed for the sake of pace and cohesion.

And the Edinburgh fringe audience is notoriously impatient with shows over 90 minutes. But it's not the end of the line for